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Case studies suggest that public housing is highly segregated by race and ethnicity, but this conclusion has not been verified on a broad sample of metropolitan areas. In this article, we use administrative data gathered from local housing authorities in 1977 by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Employing standard indices, we measure the degree of segregation in public housing projects classified by ownership status (authority-owned vs. privately subsidized) and design (family vs. elderly). We find that elderly and subsidized projects are largely white whereas family and authority-owned projects are predominantly minority. Patterns for specific SMSAs suggest that black-white segregation is very high and is determined primarily by the rate of black population growth.
Bickford et al. (Sat,) studied this question.