America's Most Diverse Neighborhoods

This is the first part in a two-part series on America's most diverse neighborhoods. Read part two here.

Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday during the Civil War, in an attempt to restore peace and unity to the United States. In today’s diverse America, Thanksgiving remains widely celebrated and crosses religious, racial, and ethnic lines (though some Native Americans consider Thanksgiving a Day of Mourning), with Americans from different regions of the U.S. and different countries around the globe bringing their own traditions to the Thanksgiving table.

This Thanksgiving, we wanted to see which neighborhoods best reflect American diversity. To do so, we identified the country’s most diverse neighborhoods and metros using Census data on race and ethnicity. We measured diversity as the share of a metro area’s or ZIP code’s population in its largest racial or ethnic group: the smaller the share of the largest group, the more diverse the neighborhood is. For instance, an area that is 70 percent white (the largest group), 20 percent black, and 10 percent Asian is less diverse than one that is 60 percent Hispanic (the largest group), 30 percent white, and 10 percent  black. In this example, the second neighborhood is more diverse because the largest group accounts for 60 percent of the population versus 70 percent in the first neighborhood (see note about Census racial and ethnic definitions at end of post).

America’s Most Diverse Metros

Among the 100 largest metros, San Jose is the most diverse. San Jose is 35 percent white (the largest group), 31 percent Asian, 28 percent Hispanic, 3 percent two-or-more races, and 2 percent black. In no other metro does the largest group have a share smaller than 35 percent. New York ranks second, with a population that is 39 percent white, 28 percent Hispanic, 19 percent Black, and 12 percent Asian. Four of the ten most diverse large metros in the U.S. are in California: San Jose, Oakland, Orange County, and San Francisco. Only one – New York – is in the Northeast, and not one is in the Midwest.

The map below shows the diversity index for counties across America. Diversity is highest in California and Hawaii, as well as much of the South. The least-diverse parts of the country (those with the highest share in the largest group), in contrast, are in New England and parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia.  

Among the 100 largest metros, Pittsburgh is the least diverse: it is 87 percent white, 8 percent black, 2 percent Asian, and 1 percent Hispanic. El Paso also stands out as America’s least-diverse large metro that is not majority-White: El Paso is 82 percent Hispanic, 13 percent white, and 3 percent black. Hispanics are the majority in Fresno, San Antonio, and Miami as well. In none of the 100 largest metros are Blacks or Asians a majority. The metro with the highest percentage of blacks is Memphis, at 45 percent, and the metro with the highest percentage of Asians is Honolulu, at 43 percent.

America’s Most Diverse Neighborhoods

The diversity people experience day-to-day, though, depends on how diverse their neighborhood is. If members of a racial or ethnic group tend to live near each other in specific neighborhoods, even diverse metros could have mostly segregated neighborhoods. So let’s turn to diversity within neighborhoods, which we define as ZIP codes.

The most diverse neighborhood in America is the ZIP code 75038. Located just east of the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, this zip code includes the neighborhoods of Broadmoor Hills and Song in Irving, Texas. That zip code is 26 percent Asian, 25 percent black, 23 percent Hispanic, and 23 percent white. The next-most diverse neighborhoods are Queens Village (11428) in the borough of Queens, New York, and San Francisco’s Treasure Island (94130).