Quote:
Originally Posted by homebucket
Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t Pittsburgh one of the least diverse major metros in the US?
From Wikipaedia:
Persons of color, or non-white Americans, represent only 13.5 percent of the region's population, compared to 38.7 percent in the United States overall.
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The metro area is pretty lily-white, but that's in part because the census defines it overly broadly, including a some counties (like Fayette and Armstrong) which really don't have anything remotely resembling "suburbs" within them. In general none of the outer counties have any nonwhite population to speak of, other than Beaver, which has a fairly sizable black population, including one majority black dying mill town (Aliquippa).
Zooming in to Allegheny County proper (but holding off on the cities) things are a bit more diverse. There's a wide swathe of black suburbia to the east of the city, which is the area that more upwardly-mobile black people from the City of Pittsburgh have traditionally moved to. The many smaller cities and boroughs of the Mon and Turtle Creek valleys are becoming blacker over time, due to a combination of preferential out-migration by white people along with lower-income city residents landing there due to gentrification (these areas have decent bus service, and cheap rentals, meaning they are doable for poor people who need to commute into the city for work or social services). Beyond the black population, the suburbs have long had a pretty substantial South Asian population which was historically focused more to the East of the city, but has more recently swung south. There is an apartment complex in the Green Tree area which has somehow become overwhelmingly Indian, which has in turn resulted in the former residents spilling out over the surrounding area as they become more established.
Now let's turn to the City of Pittsburgh itself:
The city has historically had a sizable black population, albeit a smaller one by the standards of a rust belt city. It never topped 30% of the city's population, and is probably now down to around 25% (all of the population decline of the 2010s was probably due to black flight). The historical heart of the black community was the Hill District, just to the east of Downtown, but urban renewal and the construction of housing projects scattered the black population across much of the city in the 1950s and 1960s. Still, there were never enough black people in the city to trigger the sort of wholesale flight from an entire "side" of a city as in St. Louis or Cleveland. As a result we ended up with a patchwork, where there are black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods in every part of the city (though proportionately more in the North Side and upper East End). In the 1990s the city had a fairly substantive group of Somali bantu refugees, but they have since scattered/acculturated (I seldom see anyone in traditional dress any longer).
Pittsburgh has a large and growing Asian population, but it is almost entirely comprised of college/grad students who attend University of Pittsburgh and CMU. It is also almost entirely restricted to Squirrel Hill (a traditionally Jewish neighborhood) and Shadyside (a traditionally yuppie neighborhood). There really isn't much in terms of a working-class Asian population, other than a substantial population of Bhutanese refugees (really ethnic Nepalis) who settled in the city's southern neighborhoods over the last two decades. They have been increasingly moving out to first-ring suburban neighborhoods as they become established however.
Pittsburgh has virtually no Latino population worth speaking of. For a long period of time the largest concentration of Latinos were just random middle-class folks who came here for college and settled down. There now is a small Mexican community centered around the neighborhood of Beechview in the southern part of the city (the neighborhood has a Mexican grocery and a handful of authentic restaurants) though my understanding is the population has barely increased since 2010.
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