MINNEAPOLIS _ Kendrick Bates fought his way out of poverty to within two semesters of a bachelor's degree. Now he needs an apartment.
He's been accepted at a college in suburban Roseville, but he hasn't been able to find a home in a good neighborhood that he can afford.
Bates, who now lives near the southern Minnesota town of New Ulm with his two daughters, grew up in poverty in Mississippi and is wary of the trade-offs of urban life. He is looking beyond the metro area and likes Stillwater, Hudson and New Richmond in Wisconsin.
"I don't know what's going to happen," Bates said. "I'll sleep in my car before I live in somebody's project. Worked too hard to get out of that situation."
The slow-moving, almost imperceptible erosion of cheap housing in cities and suburbs has become a tangible obstacle to the American dream. It has forced parents like Bates into extreme choices and stoked fractious debates across the country.
To take his family into the middle class, Bates needs to finish college. But to do that, he must sort through the paradox that, while small towns are great places for his children to grow up, the jobs, connections and education that he needs are in bigger places. Bates so far has been unwilling to risk the effect that life in a lower-income urban neighborhood could have on his daughters.
Economists who studied the economic progress of millions of people who were born poor found that the clearest path to success in the Midwest starts in small towns and rural areas, not in large urban centers like the Twin Cities.
A key reason is the clustering of rich apart from poor. Hennepin and Ramsey counties are nearly twice as segregated by income as the rest of Minnesota. "In a place like Minneapolis, it's much easier to separate. That's what you see, neighborhoods stratified by income," said Raj Chetty, an economist who led the research.
Economic forces and social choices are now reinforcing that stratification. Apartment rents have risen sharply in the Twin Cities for several years, leading owners to upgrade buildings and price the poor out as their income fails to keep up. Countless, heated meetings at city councils and planning agencies have yielded this: no publicly subsidized apartments have been built this decade in more than 80 suburbs and exurbs around Minneapolis and St. Paul, according to analysis by Dougherty Mortgage, a firm that tracks the local apartment market.
