America’s Most Diverse Cities [Infographic]

The story of the United States is a story of diversity, but also of different population groups creating their own communities within the country. Different definitions of diversity create diverging pictures of the country’s most diverse metro areas—and the ones appearing most diverse at first glance might not be the most mixed places after all.

The American Community Survey list almost 400 U.S. metro areas in the continental United States, which are defined by the Census Bureau as “at least one urbanized area of at least 50,000 population, plus adjacent counties having a high degree of social and economic integration with the core as measured through commuting ties.”

Out of these areas, the ones where the biggest shares of the population identify as a race other than white cluster in California, Texas and Hawaii. El Centro in California—registering the highest share of non-white population at 82.3%—as well as Laredo, McAllen-Edinburg-Mission and El Paso in Texas all hug the border with Mexico, giving them especially high Latino populations. According to the Census, Latinos in the U.S. most often identify their race as “other” or “more than one race”, while around 20% define their race as white. This leads to the share of the Latino populations of the four aforementioned metros ranging between 83% in El Paso and a whopping 96% in Laredo.

Urban Honolulu and the Kahului-Wailuku-Lahaina metro in Hawaii as well as San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, California, meanwhile owe their high non-white populations to the concentration of another race: Asians. Their share ranges from 30% to 42% in these metros. While this is lower than the concentration of Latinos in border communities, the findings still beg the question if high shares of a single race or ethnicity other than white people constitutes true diversity.

Most diverse=most like the U.S. overall?

In another approach, an index score calculated by Statista therefore measures the divergence of the racial and ethnic makeups of metro areas from the U.S. average. In this approach, Texas’ College Station-Bryan, a metro of around 270,000 people that is home to the flagship campus of Texas A&M University, is the city most closely matching the U.S. average. The metro’s white population stands at around 65%, a little higher than the 61.2% U.S. average. Apart from that, divergence remains under one percentage point for most races, with the exception of “other” races, whose share is 2.6 percentage points lower, and those identifying as Latino, whose share is around 8 percentage points higher, than in the U.S. on average.

Other metros which match the U.S. racial and ethnic distribution quite closely are New Haven-Milford and Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk in Connecticut, Sebring-Avon Park in south-central Florida as well as Chicago, Atlantic City, Jacksonville, North Carolina, and Wichita, Kansas. With white populations reaching as high as 72% in the case of Wichita, the measure might also be an unsatisfying one in the attempt to measure real diversity, however.

The country’s largest cities

Finally, a second index that combines both aspects—the divergence from the U.S. average racial and ethnic distribution and the divergence from the United States’ most non-white metro—hits on more of the country’s large cities that would generally be seen as the most diverse in the nation. The list is led by New York City, followed by Washington D.C., Chicago, Atlantic City and San Francisco. In the case of New York, a white population of around 46%, combined with somewhat elevated levels of inhabitants from all other races and ethnicities facilitates the top score. In ranks 6-8, Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk in Connecticut reappears, followed by Goldsboro, North Carolina, and Trenton-Princeton, New Jersey.

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Charted by Statista