The Philadelphia Inquirer includes a story today on changes in Philadelphia’s black population, which for the first time “clearly outnumbers” all other ethnic or racial groups. But the population is shifting, with large gains in population in places like the lower Northeast and Southwest, but losses here in West Philadelphia, the Northwest part of the city and in neighborhoods around Center City.

Whites leaving the city is the key factor in the increased percentage of blacks, the Inquirer reports. Middle-class blacks leaving the city for the suburbs is a related trend. The black population in the Pennsylvania suburbs increased 26 percent since 2000.

About 21 percent of the city’s population is now Asian and Hispanic.