Segregation is one of our nation’s most enduring and intractable problems. More than 60 years since the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision denounced racial segregation in primary and secondary public schools, and 50 years since the enactment of the federal Fair Housing Act, our neighborhoods and schools have yet to reflect the rich diversity of our nation as a whole. Given the seriousness of the problem of racial segregation as a cause of racial inequality and the complexities in understanding the nature of this problem, the Haas Institute is launching a series of briefs that will attempt to illuminate these patterns and demystify the reality of segregation in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This map allows you to select various measures of segregation. No one measure captures all of the complexities of segregation, but together, we hope to paint a compelling picture of how segregation effects the Bay Area.

Measures of Segregation:

• Divergence: The divergence between the demographics of the tract and its CBSA.
• Entropy Score: The closeness of the tract to having completely equal racial/ethnic proportions.
• Dissimilarity: How unevenly two groups are distributed across tracts within a county.
• Exposure: The exposure of one race/ethnicity to another across the county.
• Isolation: The isolation of one race/ethnicity within a county.
• Location Quotient: The over- or under-representation of one race/ethnicity compared to the tract's CBSA.