Philadelphia Area 9th most segregated urban area in America

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Main city population: 1,526,006
Metropolitan population: 5,965,343
Segregation level (dissimilarity): 68.41

According to University of Pennsylvania historian Thomas Sugrue, just 347 of the 120,000 homes constructed in the Philadelphia area between 1946 and 1953 were open to blacks. In the postwar years, working-class whites violently policed the boundaries of their neighborhoods, while the middle and upper classes fled to the suburbs well into the 1990s. Today, Puerto Rican neighborhoods divide working-class white and black neighborhoods in North Philadelphia and Kensington.

"The patterns of housing segregation in metropolitan Philadelphia are the legacy of discriminatory public policies and real-estate practices that played out for most of the 20th century," says Sugrue, who chronicled the area's open housing movement in "Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North." "Though discrimination is now illegal, those patterns of segregation were so deeply entrenched that many people came to see them as 'natural.'"

According to census data, the level of segregation between blacks and whites in the Philadelphia area is declining at a slower rate than during the 1990s. And just as white city-dwellers fled neighborhoods when black families arrived after World War II, suburban whites are fleeing to exurbs as blacks and Latinos move to older suburbs.

Local media coverage of the 2010 census data has emphasized that Philadelphia grew for the first time after 50 years of decline, thanks laregly to growing Latino and Asian populations. The persistence of segregation, however, has gone unmentioned, but the warning signs are clear: Whites led growth in far-flung counties like Chester in Pennsylvania, Gloucester and Ocean in New Jersey, and Cecil in Maryland; white population declined everywhere else as blacks, Latinos and Asians moved to resegregating older suburbs.

During the 1950s and '60s, Philadelphia was a center of open housing activism. Civil rights activist and housing developer Morris Milgram, the Jewish son of left-wing garment-worker activists, was at the lead of the nationwide movement, building his own integrated neighborhoods in the 1950s and '60s. The first development was Concord Park, built as a near replica of the then-whites-only subdivisions in Levittown.

Desegregation has also been contentious across the Delaware River in South Jersey, where suburbs are deeply fragmented, with miniature tax fiefdoms for the rich and white just minutes from crumbling warehouses for the poor like Camden.

Discussions about race in Philly are usually met with a deafening backlash from local whites, and the comments sections of the website of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News are locally infamous for their bigotry. Witness the letter to the editor written in response to this reporter's recent article on regional segregation for Philadelphia Weekly:

"Between my wife and I, we work 3 jobs in one household so we can live as far as possible from Section 8 housing. Keep your brave new world, liberal views to yourself. I don't want section 8 anywhere near me. I don't want anyone receiving any type of government assistance living near me," wrote Steve Arlo. "I pay THOUSANDS of dollars a year in Federal, State, City and property taxes to keep it away from my neighborhood. I'll say it. They don't deserve to live in or near my neighborhood. When are we going to stop this 'free money' mentality? I don't care how horrible their neighborhood is. You made your bed now sleep in it. Remember, neighborhoods are made up of those that live in them."

For the besieged white subdivision dweller, the American dream means freedom from society's poor and black.

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2. New York

3. Chicago

4. Detroit

5. Cleveland

6. Buffalo

7. St. Louis

8. Cincinnati

9. Philadelphia

10. Los Angeles