From the New York Times:
"Even as the New York metropolitan area has become more diverse as a whole, individual neighborhoods have remained stubbornly resistant to racial integration.
"Although housing segregation declined slightly in the New York area since 2000, New York passed Detroit and Chicago to reach second place, behind Milwaukee, in a ranking by Dr. Frey of segregation of blacks and whites.
"New York's persistently high level of housing segregation results from several factors, although a number of them also prevail in other metropolitan areas where integration has increased.
"John R. Logan, a sociologist at Brown University and director of the US2010 Project, a research project at Brown on recent population changes [describes segregation in New York suburbs:] 'The suburbs initially had restrictive covenants in many places, and when some older suburbs became less attractive to whites - such as Hempstead Village - they turned rapidly into minority enclaves, so the old city-versus-suburb segregation was reproduced within suburbia.'"