Tipping points
Here are a couple of interesting pieces on the “tipping point” theory of racial segregation.
Why do racially-segregated neighborhoods exist and persist? The standard explanation is that whites don’t like to live near, say, African-Americans; when African-Americans start moving in, whites start moving out. Real estate agents steer whites away from African-American neighborhoods and vice versa. And let’s not forget the legacy of de jure segregation, which herded African Americans into a few neighborhoods; residential patterns typically change slowly. The standard explanation relies on more or less overt, conscious racism.
There’s clearly some of that going on. Most cities — Austin included — had either de facto or de jure rules that relegated African Americans to just a few, exclusively African-American neighborhoods. Although I consider Austin a fairly racially tolerant place today, it is still strikingly segregated: