Americans Claim to Like Diversity, But Do They Really? 
(PEW, December 2008)
Excerpt: About six-in-ten Americans say they like the idea of living in politically, racially, religiously or economically mixed communities, while about a quarter take the opposite view: They would rather live in communities made up mostly of people like themselves. The rest say they have no strong opinion on the issue, according to a new nationwide Pew Research Center Social & Demographic Trends survey.  This preference for diverse communities is greater among Democrats, liberals, college graduates, blacks, and secular Americans than it is among the population as a whole. But virtually all major groups, at least to some degree, choose diversity over homogeneity when asked where they would like to live. Despite these pro-diversity attitudes, however, American communities appear to have grown more politically and economically homogenous in recent decades, according to analyses of election returns and U.S. Census data.

Redlining Richmond
In the late 1930s the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), a New Deal agency created to refinance homes and prevent foreclosures, worked with local lenders and realtors to assess neighborhoods using a number of factors ranging from terrain to income levels to the "infiltration of a lower grade population" (by which they meant African Americans, Jews, and immigrants). Using these assessments they assigned a grade for each neighborhood's "residential security." This site focuses on the assessment surveys and map produced for Richmond, Virginia. Running throughout the assessment surveys collected by the HOLC is the issue of race, and this site allows you to investigate the centrality of race in the politics and on the landscape of Richmond in the late 1930s. John V. Moeser, senior fellow at the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement, brought the HOLC assessment surveys and security map for Richmond to our attention and lent his expertise in the history of twentieth-century Richmond.

Through Boom and Bust: Minorities, Immigrants, and Home Ownership (PEW, May 2009)
Excerpt:  The boom-and-bust cycle in the U.S. housing market over the past decade and a half has generated greater gains and larger losses for minority groups than it has for whites, according to an analysis of housing, economic and demographic data by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center. ¹  From 1995 through the middle of this decade, homeownership rates rose more rapidly among all minorities than among whites. But since the start of the housing bust in 2005, rates have fallen more steeply for two of the nation's largest minority groups -- blacks and native-born Latinos -- than for the rest of the population.   Overall, the ups and downs in the housing market since 1995 have reduced the homeownership gap between whites and all racial and ethnic minority groups. However, a substantial gap persists.As of 2008, 74.9% of whites owned homes, compared with 59.1% of Asians, 48.9% of Hispanics and 47.5% of blacks.

Why Place Matters: Building the Movement for Healthy Communities (PolicyLink, an advocacy group for social equity founded in1999)
"This report states that where you live determines how well you live, and that available resources are not always equally distributed. Communities of color and low-income communities face harmful community environments, such as poverty, toxins, or economic disinvestment, that compromise individual and community health. The framework described in this report provides a way to understand the relationship between community conditions and health, analyzes the connections among all the environmental factors that contribute to a healthy community, and identifies environmental effects on community health."