Even as Los Angeles and other American cities have become more racially diverse over the last few decades, segregation and the inequities that go along with it have changed little, according to new research from UC Berkeley.

The Los Angeles metropolitan area has seen only slight improvements, the study found, and remains the sixth-most segregated of the 221 metro areas. Some other regions of the state ranked in the study did even worse. The metropolitan regions of Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, Santa Barbara, San Jose, Riverside, Sacramento, Oxnard, Vallejo, San Diego, Modesto, Chico, San Luis Obispo, Bakersfield and San Francisco all saw their segregation numbers worsen, the study found.

The Roots of Structural Racism Project was unveiled this month after several years of investigation, researchers said. Its findings are stark: 81% of U.S. metropolitan regions with at least 200,000 residents were more segregated in 2019 than they were in 1990.

New York, Chicago and Milwaukee were the most segregated metropolitan regions, while the Midwest and mid-Atlantic were the most segregated areas of the country, followed by the West Coast.

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