By The Editors

Last month newspaper articles trumpeted a startling finding: the sharp decline in black-white residential segregation in America’s 85 largest cities.

That was the conclusion of a new study – titled “The End of the Segregated Century” (PDF) – done by two economists at Harvard University and Duke University, respectively, for the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute think tank.

The study found that black suburbanization, gentrification, access to credit fair housing laws and immigration all have contributed to making the country’s neighborhoods significantly “more racially integrated than at any time in the past century,” said one of the scholars, Jacob Vigdor, of Duke. Vigdor and his colleague, Edward Glaeser, of Harvard, added in the report that “lily-white neighborhoods” are now “effectively extinct.”

Their study also stated that although “the end of segregation has not caused the end of racial inequality” and that “far too many Americans still lack the opportunity to achieve meaningful success,”  nonetheless, the decline in segregation is “good news.”

But several other scholars expert in racial and demographic trends, while agreeing that residential segregation has declined since the 1960s, described the study’s conclusion as overstated.

For example, Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the liberal-leaning Economic Policy Institute, contends that it’s “premature” to describing the lessening of segregation as an “end.” In fact, Rothstein, who’s also a senior fellow of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. contends that the economic losses black Americans have suffered because of the Great Recession and the “epidemic of foreclosures” brought on by the subprime mortgage crisis mean that “segregation can only get worse.”

To read Rothstein’s response, click here.