“What we’re kind of seeing is a tendency of more and more higher-income households to just self-isolate and live in neighborhoods or communities that are predominated by others like them,” said Jessica Martin, an independent researcher who co-authored the report.
In 2023, the Boston area’s income segregation metric reached a high of 43 percent, meaning that that percent of Boston’s low and high income households are living among others who share their income level. The percentage rose steadily from 1980, when the figure stood at 32 percent, to 2015, when the percentage reached 41 percent.
Then, from 2015 to 2020, the figure dropped 3 percentage points to 39 percent, before increasing again by 4 percentage points to 43 percent in 2023.
High-income households are driving income segregation by moving into the same neighborhoods, the researchers found. As a result, lower income households are clustering together, but not by choice.
The report found that since 2010, 29 percent of low-income households lived in neighborhoods where other residents are also low income, a percentage which has stayed fairly consistent. The percentage of high-income households living in among others who make the same income jumped from 7 to 15 percent in roughly the last 40 years.
Researchers point to a dearth of rental housing in some communities and the growing cost of buying a home in the Boston area for the growing concentration of people living together at the same income levels.
“Communities that have almost no rental housing are, by definition, excluding low and moderate-income families who aren’t able to afford the purchases of those homes, and because race and income are so intertwined, those housing policy decisions are one of the key reasons why we’re so segregated,” said Luc Schuster, executive director of Boston Indicators and the report’s co-author, who said income and racial segregation combine to form residential segregation.
Boston has become more racially diverse in recent decades, with an influx of immigrants bringing more Hispanic, Asian, and Black communities to the area.
This increase in diversity has led to more exposure, meaning that people of different groups are more likely to interact with one another, said Aja Kennedy, a research fellow at Boston Indicators and co-author of the report.
“This increase in exposure is driven a lot by diversity and not as much in different groups living in the same neighborhoods,” Kennedy said, meaning that while exposure has increased, neighborhoods themselves are not necessarily more likely to contain people of different groups. Instead, more diversity means people are more likely to interact with others belonging to different economic backgrounds.
In 2020, Boston rose to a diversity index of 52 percent, a strong positive change since 16 percent in 1980. The diversity index refers to “how likely it is that two people selected at random belong to different groups.”
In the Boston metro area, as defined by the US Census Bureau, from 1980 to 2020, the white population has steadily decreased over the decades, from 92 percent of the overall population in 1980 down to 67 percent in 2020, according to Boston Indicators’ analysis.
In that same timeframe, the Hispanic population had the largest growth, comprising just 2 percent of the area’s population in 1980 to 12 percent in 2020. The Black population doubled in percentage, growing from 4 to 8 percent and the Asian population increased tenfold, from 1 to 10 percent in 40 years.
According to the US Census Bureau, the Boston metropolitan area includes Boston, Cambridge, Newton and, in New Hampshire, Rockingham and Stafford counties.
While the report was created as an educational tool, the authors hope that it can be used to further educate the population as well as policymakers on the importance of understanding how segregation impacts residents.
“I think one of the clearest policy avenues in addressing these issues is housing. Residential segregation is about where people live, and you can’t choose to reside in a community that is not accessible to you,” said Schuster.
This story will be updated.
Katarina Schmeiszer can be reached at katarina.schmeiszer@globe.com. Follow her on X at @katschmeiszer.
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