Despite increased racial and ethnic diversity, American neighborhoods continue to be segregated and some of the progress made toward integration since 1980 has come to a halt this decade, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data released Tuesday.

“This is a surprising result,” said Brown University sociology professor John Logan, who analyzed 2005-09 Census numbers. “At worst, it was expected that there would be continued slow progress.”

The five-year data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey provide the first opportunity to gauge post-2000 demographic trends all the way down to small neighborhoods.

Logan and his co-author, Florida State University sociologist Brian Stults, also head the US 2010 research project, which examines changes in American society. They found:

•The average non-Hispanic white person continues to live in a neighborhood that looks very different from neighborhoods where the average black, Hispanic and Asian live. Average whites in metropolitan America live in a neighborhood that’s 74% white — although it’s not as segregated as in 1980, when the average was 88% white.

Even if segregation had continued to slide this decade at the same rate as in the previous 20 years, “It would take into the middle of the century for black segregation rates to come down to the Hispanic level,” says Roderick Harrison, a demographer at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and a former chief of racial statistics at the Census Bureau. “(The decline) was very incremental.”

This article was previously available at The Tucson Citizen.