Washington Post, October 29, 2011: McGovern Drive looked like the sanitized slice of suburbia presented on television in 1965, the year Wayne and Virginia Cole moved into a tidy brick ranch home just outside the Beltway in Montgomery County. The Coles, and everyone else who lived in the neighborhood back then, were white.
Today their Silver Spring community of Hillandale is home to people of every race and ethnicity undefined the epitome of what one sociologist calls “global neighborhoods” that are upending long-standing patterns of residential segregation.
Around the region and across the country, the archetypal all-white neighborhood is vanishing with remarkable speed. In many places, the phenomenon is not being driven by African Americans moving to the suburbs. Instead, it is primarily the result of the nation’s soaring number of Hispanics and Asians, many of whom are immigrants.
The result has been the emergence of neighborhoods, from San Diego to Denver to Miami, that are more diverse than at any time in American history.
As the nation barrels toward the day, just three decades from now, when non-Hispanic whites are expected to be a minority, these global neighborhoods have already begun remaking the American social fabric in significant ways. Their creation and impact have been especially pronounced in the Washington area, where minorities are now the majority. [Read More]
