Americans Claim to Like Diverse Communities but Do They Really? - Pew Research Center
...these survey findings raise an obvious question: Is the public's generally strong preference for diverse communities to be taken at face value, or might it be based in part on respondents choosing the answers they deem to be socially desirable?
While it's impossible to know for sure, it is worth noting that residential segregation has long been a fact of life in America, and that, at least by certain measures, some varieties of segregation appear to be on the rise.
The most pervasive forms of residential segregation, by far, are racial and ethnic. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, while blacks comprise just 12% of the U.S. population, about half of all blacks in 2000 lived in majority-black neighborhoods.2 Hispanics also tend to be clustered into segregated enclaves, though not quite to the same degree as are blacks. Latinos made up 12.5% of the U.S. population and 43% lived in majority-Latino neighborhoods as of 2000. (The table below ranks the nation's most populous multi-racial and multi-ethnic metropolitan areas by their levels of black/non-black and Hispanic/non-Hispanic residential segregation.)
Trends in residential segregation have been mixed over the past several decades. Black/white segregation has declined significantly since 1960, when fully 70% of blacks lived in majority black neighborhoods.3 But immigrant segregation as well as Hispanic and Asian segregation has increased in recent decades,4 as has overall economic segregation. From 1970 to 2000, there was a 32% increase in the residential separation of high-income Americans (those in the top income quintile) from all other Americans, according to one analysis of Census data.5 Even with this increasing spatial isolation of the well-to-do, however, blacks are still nearly three times as segregated from whites as are affluent Americans from those who are less well off.