The National Survey of Black Suburbia [NSBS] is a first of its kind survey of the experiences of Black residents living in the suburbs. NSBS takes a place-based approach to understanding Black experiences along five key arenas: housing, education, policing, political participation, and local community relations. The survey is designed to allow analyses across four main axes of variation among Black suburbanites: demographic group, type of suburban community, suburb/central city residence, and geographic region. NSBS joins a field of national ethnic surveys such as the National Asian American Survey, the National Black Election Survey, National Survey of American Life, and the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey.

These new data will help reorient thinking in sociology, political science, education, and policy, focusing on a long-understudied group (Black suburbanites) whose exclusion from suburban spaces was rooted in public policies such as redlining, restrictive covenants, antiblack violence, and scholarship that centered Whiteness. This survey responds to the recent calls in scholarship for understanding the varied contours of Black placemaking and for paying closer attention to class and ethnic differentiation in Black communities.

During the Spring of 2024, the team contracted with Amerispeak on the Black Suburban Experience Survey Pilot. Surveyed respondents were located in both suburbs and central cities. These data are currently being analyzed by the team. This pilot data will provide a departure point for the development of National Survey of Black Suburbia.