Last week, a national study found Hampton Roads is the third-most integrated metropolitan area in America, among the top 50. Only Augusta, Ga., and Raleigh-Durham are more integrated, according to the study from the State University of New York at Albany. And the region is slowly growing more integrated each year, according to a Virginian-Pilot analysis of 2000 census data. The fifth, Virginia Beach, changed only slightly. Virginia Beach's black population seems smaller because it is only 19 percent of the total.
Most black residents are well-mixed into the general population.
That means there are fewer black neighborhoods in Virginia Beach, especially compared with many nearly all-black neighborhoods in Norfolk and Portsmouth. The largest concentration of black residents in Virginia Beach is in the apartments and townhouses near Virginia Wesleyan College, where blacks are a majority in three census tracts. It is the percentage of a minority group that would have to move to new neighborhoods to achieve perfect integration. Lower numbers mean higher integration. Virginia Beach's dissimilarity index in 2000 was 33, the lowest of any city in Hampton Roads.