The increasing racial and ethnic diversity in the Twin Cities’ suburbs is a “glass half full” situation, says Myron Orfield, executive director of a University of Minnesota-based organization that has released a new report.
“They are wonderful, great places,” Orfield said. “The challenge is to get them to stay that way. We need to work on it. It doesn’t happen by accident.”
Twin Cities’ suburbs, particularly those in the inner ring, are diversifying at a rate that is among the fastest in the nation’s top 50 metro areas, according to a new report from the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity (formerly known as the Institute on Race and Poverty).
In 2000, just 6 percent of Twin Cities suburbanites lived in communities that were integrated, defined as from 20 percent to 60 percent minority. By 2010, that figure had jumped to 29 percent.
That’s still relatively low compared with other parts of the country. Nationally, 44 percent of suburbanites in the largest metro areas live in diverse communities, up from 38 percent a decade ago.
The report goes a step beyond other research on the topic of suburban diversity to address the social consequences, showing that “stable integrated suburbs” tend to be places where both whites and nonwhites “can grow up, study, work and govern together effectively.” The report cautions that public policy is needed to help suburbs maintain healthy integration and not evolve into segregated communities consisting primarily of people of color.
Neighborhoods with a healthy mix of races tend to have smaller educational achievement gaps, better-run city government, more affordable tax rates and a higher percentage of nonwhite children who go to college, Orfield said.
The authors studied neighborhoods in other parts of the country that were integrated in 1980 and found that a little more than half have since become predominately nonwhite, with the same economic and social problems that tend to plague central cities.
“Integrated communities have a hard time staying integrated for more than 10 or 20 years,” the report says. “The process is driven by a wide variety of factors, including housing discrimination, inequitable school attendance policies and racial preferences shaped by past and present discrimination.”
Orfield noted that the Twin Cities once had strong fair housing policies, including a program that ensured that affordable housing units were built in the suburbs, but those were pushed aside in the mid-1980s.
Libby Starling, research director for the Metropolitan Council, said the council is working on a new housing policy, which will be the first such plan since 1985. Starling said the council will examine incentives for encouraging communities to build affordable housing. The housing policy is expected to be part of a new regional long-range plan that will be released in 2014.
INNER-RING CHANGES
Diversity in the Twin Cities’ suburbs varies dramatically. Within the inner-ring suburbs, it ranges from 5 percent nonwhite population in Lilydale to 54 percent nonwhite in Brooklyn Center, according to 2010 census data. Overall, about 21 percent of the metro area’s population is people of color (which includes Hispanics).
“We’ve continued to see increased immigration to the Twin Cities in the last decade, and there has been tremendous growth to populations of color generally,” state demographer Susan Brower said.
Starling said much of the influx of minorities to the suburbs is due to turnover of housing. As younger families move in, they are more likely to be minorities because the state’s younger population is more racially and ethnically diverse.
Brower said the rapid changes in some suburbs could affect the November elections — a point also addressed in Orfield’s report. “Our suburbs have an eligible minority voting pool that’s larger than it has ever been in the past,” Brower said. “It has the potential (for) different voting behavior than we’ve seen in the past.”
Maplewood is one of the east metro communities rapidly diversifying, going from 12 percent nonwhite in 2000 to 27 percent a decade later.
“It’s a natural progression of life,” Maplewood City Manager Jim Antonen said.
He said the city hasn’t seen any negative effects of the diversification but has made some small changes. The most noticeable was the need for bilingual staff, particularly among public safety workers.
“I guess, knock on wood, we haven’t had problems,” Antonen said. “We are a first-ring city, so we do have our share of crime and stuff like that, but, so far, I think we’ve been doing a pretty good job. I don’t think you can rest on your laurels, though. In our case, we just try to treat everybody equally.”
In West St. Paul, where nonwhites now make up 30 percent of the population, Mayor John Zanmiller said he has seen an increase in demand for city services and a decrease in civic engagement — everything from volunteering to voting — particularly in the part of town that has the newest residents. Zanmiller is concerned about this because he believes civic engagement leads to “a healthy and vibrant town.”
“We can’t just meet constituent demands,” Zanmiller said. “We also need to find a way to get them involved in the process, because the way the city operates should be a reflection of its total population.”
MaryJo Webster can be reached at 651-228-5507. Follow her at twitter.com/mndatamine.
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