Understanding Residential Patterns in Multiethnic Cities and Suburbs in the US and Canada

Lingxin Hao, Johns Hopkins University
Eric Fong, University of Toronto

Studies document that more immigrants have chosen to settle in suburbs within a short period of time after arrival, and minority groups increasingly reside in suburban neighborhoods. Subsequently, suburbs have transformed to greater diversity. In this paper, we address this emerging multiethnic suburban residential pattern in New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in the United States, and Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and Calgary in Canada. The study is based on the entropy index and the Theil’s information theory index H suggested by Reardon and Firebaugh (2002) to capture the multiethnic context. Our analysis first compares residential patterns with different levels of group compositions. We then compare the current residential patterns in suburbs and cities with patterns ten years ago. Finally, we compare the urban-suburban patterns in the U.S. with those in Canada. We hope to deepen our understanding of residential patterns in multi ethno-racial cities and suburbs.