"If you want to understand the origins of segregation in the U.S., you have to look at this period between 1900 and 1930," says Allison Shorter, an economist at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied detailed, digitized census forms from that era.As we never tire of pointing out, "birds of a feather" do in fact flock together. Happily or otherwise, it is an apparently "hard-wired" aspect of human nature.
Even if the Fair Housing Act had existed back then, if restrictive covenants were illegal in 1920s America, we'd have gotten segregated cities anyway because of behavior that's beyond the reach of regulation. You can create a lot segregation, this research says, without having any discriminatory institutions. Uncoordinated market choices create it.
It's not just true in the U.S., either. You find ethnic enclaves in many large foreign cities too - a Chinatown or Turkish neighborhood, perhaps a barrio or Pakistani area, a Romany encampment.
