Black segregation in American cities has reached its lowest point in more than a century, according to a Manhattan Institute report. However, the report cautions that doesn’t mean segregation has disappeared completely from neighborhoods across the country. 

But the report suggests the country has made strides in making neighborhoods more inclusive. “All-white neighborhoods are effectively extinct,” the report says, adding that none of the housing markets among the 85 studied had a level of black isolation as high as the national average 40 years ago.

"This shift does not mean that segregation has disappeared," the report says. "The typical urban African American lives in a housing market where more than half the black population would need to move in order to achieve complete integration."

Researchers point to black suburbanization, access to credit, fair housing laws, and immigration has helping to decline black segregation in the country. 

"America is now more racially integrated than anytime in the past century," says Jacob Vigdor, a professor with Duke University, and co-author of the research. "There's been black suburbanization and the elimination of lily-white neighborhoods."

But other experts say that the country still has a long way to go. "We're nowhere near the end of segregation," Brown University sociologist John Logan told USA Today. Logan was not involved in the study. "There are still no signs of whites moving into what were previously all-minority neighborhoods, and there is still considerable white abandonment of mixed areas."

Source: “Study Finds Black Segregation in Cities is Lowest in Century,” USA Today (Jan. 31, 2012)