Study: Miami among least diverse

A new study ranks Miami as the sixth least diverse large city in the United States. Crazy, right?

It’s hard to imagine a city that’s filled with Cubans, Haitians, Brazilians, Venezuelans, Argentines, African Americans (the list goes on) could be considered anything but diverse. But there’s Miami, just ahead of Pittsburgh and behind St. Louis on WalletHub’s 2017 analysis.

WalletHub, a personal finance data website, took five different types of diversity into account: socioeconomic, cultural, economic, household and religious.

Guillermo Grenier, a sociology professor at Florida International University, said it makes perfect sense — if you lump all Hispanic subgroups together.

“People don’t come to the U.S. as Hispanics. They come as Guatemalans and Cubans,” he said. “They get here and find out they’re Hispanics.”

U.S. Census data, which the WalletHub analysis relied on, funnels people into a narrow set of categories. Follow-up questions on the Census could break up those big categories (like White, Hispanic or Asian) further and offer a more detailed analysis that would likely show the diversity of a city. Census data from 2010 shows Miami is 70 percent Hispanic.

Grenier called Miami “a very segregated city” and pointed to county population maps that show different ethnic groups adhering to strict geographic boundaries that fit together “like puzzle pieces.” He said his studies have shown MiamiDade’s various ethnic groups are isolationist and rarely intermingle.

“When rubber meets the road we see very little diversity in certain neighborhoods,” he said.

Last year, Hialeah topped the list as the fourth least diverse U.S. city, but with a new way of arranging the data it’s now listed as the second least diverse midsize city. The only midsize city Hialeah is less diverse than, according to WalletHub, is Provo, Utah.