2 Northern VA Cities Rank Among The Most Ethnically Diverse In U.S.

VIRGINIA — Ten Virginia communities were ranked among the nation's most ethnically diverse cities, with two Northern Virginia cities placing in the top 100, according to a report released by the financial website WalletHub.

WalletHub recently compared more than 500 of the largest cities in the U.S. and ranked them based on three factors: ethnic diversity, including ethnicity and race, language, and birthplace.

Virginia cities and their ranking on the list are:

• No. 46 Alexandria
• No. 77 Arlington
• No. 166 Newport News
• No. 169 Norfolk
• No. 181 Virginia Beach
• No. 209 Richmond
• No. 215 Chesapeake
• No. 218 Hampton
• No. 259 Roanoke
• No. 277 Portsmouth

The U.S. today is a melting pot of cultures, thanks to increasing ethnic and racial diversification. If the trend continues, America will be more diverse than ever by 2045, at which point no single ethnic group will constitute the majority in the U.S. for the first time, the Census Bureau says.

To learn more about the study and how other communities ranked, read WalletHub’s 2023 Most & Least Ethnically Diverse Cities in the U.S. report here.

Methodology

In order to determine the most ethnically diverse places in America, WalletHub compared 501 of the most populated U.S. cities across three key metrics: 1) Ethnoracial Diversity, 2) Linguistic Diversity and 3) Birthplace Diversity. Our data set, each metric’s subcomponents and its corresponding weight are listed below. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with 100 representing the most ethnic diversity.

They then determined city’s weighted average across all metrics to calculate its “Ethnic Diversity Score” and used the resulting scores to rank-order our sample.

Each city in our sample refers to city proper and excludes the surrounding metro area. Wallethub limited its sample to no more than 10 cities from each state and categorized them according to population size.

This analysis was conducted using the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index method, which is a commonly accepted measurement of market concentration that also works effectively as a general-purpose measure of diversity.