Boston Indicators data analysis finds Greater Boston becoming less segregated by race; more segregated by income
Report examines interaction as well as demographics; finds growing isolation for Latinos and Asians, and between high- and low-income families
August 19, 2025
Boston—A new report from Boston Indicators finds that a diversifying Greater Boston is making progress against historical racial segregation trends, but that the region is becoming more segregated across income groups. The new report, Residential Segregation in Greater Boston: Shifting Patterns by Race and Income, looks beyond high-level demographics to examine the interactions and isolation of racial and income groups within the larger community.
“By looking at how evenly Metro Boston’s racial and income groups are distributed, and how much they interact with each other, we can get a much better sense of whether residents are truly living with each other, as opposed to existing in separate but neighboring communities,” said Aja Kennedy, Research Fellow at Boston Indicators, who worked with Luc Schuster, Executive Director of Boston Indicators and research consultant Jessica Martin to prepare the report.
“By these metrics,” Kennedy added, “We can see that Metro Boston residents of different races are interacting more often than they were decades ago. But as income disparities have grown, so too, has the isolation of higher- and lower-income communities from one another.”
The report takes on the questions of racial and income segregation separately, while acknowledging that racial income disparities connect the two sets. It looks at the region’s dissimilarity index, which estimates what share of one group would need to move in order to match the residential pattern of another group, and finds that while White-Black and White-Asian dissimilarity has shrunk since 1980, meaning those groups are integrated more often, the index finds dissimilarity has grown between Whites and Latinos.
The focus then shifts to isolation, where the report finds that while White and Black residents are less isolated today in Metro Boston than they were four decades ago, the share of Asians and Latinos living in isolation from other groups has risen significantly. Overall, Boston-area residents of different races interact less frequency than in the majority of peer cities.
“The persistence, and even growth, of isolation of racial groups in Metro Boston is likely caused by a mix of policy and personal choices,” said Luc Schuster, Executive Director of Boston Indicators. “Isolation can signal greater cohesion and support systems within communities. The issue becomes problematic when policies such as restrictive zoning force groups to cluster, and when those clusters have unequal access to public goods, like quality education, transportation, and health care.”
While racial segregation in the region is showing signs of improvement, data around suggest it has been replaced by an increase in segregation based on income. One issue: a shrinking of the middle-income cohort bridging high and low incomes. Overall, the median income in the region has risen 16% in the past decade when controlling for inflation, but the percentages of families earning more than double or less than 67% of that median have both risen – meaning the middle is getting smaller.
Meanwhile, those higher- and lower-income households are less likely to interact today. The region’s Racial Income Segregation Index stands at 0.43, which means 43 percent of low- and high-income households are segregated among others like themselves. That result places Boston in the middle of the pack among the 50 large metropolitan areas – but it is still up from an index of 0.32 back in 1980.
“Understanding that relationship between how we segregate ourselves versus how diverse our overall population highlights a vital story about who we are as a region,” said Schuster. “Where racial and income clusters result in a clustering of resources, power and access, a region that appears diverse may, in fact, be reinforcing racial and income segregation. It’s a question worth exploring further for Boston and other regions.”