Study Calls L.I. Most Segregated Suburb

This village and Garden City have been municipal neighbors for decades, one stop away from each other on the Long Island Rail Road, a four-minute ride. But despite their shared boundary, they are worlds apart.

Garden City is home to many executives. It has a median family income of $120,305, houses that look like pages out of decorator magazines, downtown businesses like Saks and Fidelity Investments and a population that is 92 percent white. The mayor and village and school board members are all white.

Hempstead is a working-class community. It has a $46,675 median family income, midrise apartment buildings, generic middle-class homes, a downtown with storefront churches, thrift shops and Spanish restaurants, and a population that is 51 percent black and 32 percent Hispanic. The mayor is black, as are all but one of the village and school board members.

Such separation of blacks and whites is the rule, not the exception, across Nassau and Suffolk Counties, so much so that a new study comparing rates of integration in different communities ranks Long Island as the nation's most segregated suburb.

''African-Americans have faced isolation far more than any other group, especially on Long Island,'' said David Rusk, an international consultant on urban and suburban issues who analyzed the segregation patterns. Other minority groups are more integrated, the figures show.

Erase Racism, a year-old nonprofit group sponsored by the Long Island Community Foundation in Jericho, hired Mr. Rusk to research the study and present it at a conference in Islandia on Wednesday. What he finds is a new version of an old problem.