MINNEAPOLIS _ Ethrophic Burnett escaped the South Side of Chicago, moved to Minneapolis "to have a life for my kids" _ and wound up in a social experiment.
In the late 1990s, when the oldest of her children were just in elementary school, her family was one of hundreds that was moved to the Twin Cities suburbs as the result of a federal fair housing lawsuit. Her children thrived, she said. They developed new ambitions that otherwise might have seemed distant.
Then, three years ago, as her oldest daughter entered college, Burnett lost eligibility for the home she was living in and moved the family back to the poorest area of Minneapolis.
"I prayed about it, and I didn't want it. I was like, 'Nope, nope, nope,'" she said. "But my hand was being forced."
Across the United States, the likelihood that poor children will eventually rise into the middle class or beyond depends heavily on where they live. Suburbs and small towns remain beacons of opportunity for the poor, places where their poor children are more likely to grow up to earn more money than their parents.
The hardest places in the United States to overcome poverty are the nation's cities, where rich and poor live in separate worlds and where most poor and most black children live.
In Minnesota, the divide is stark.
A massive, ongoing study of income data by economists at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, has found that many of the places with the greatest so-called "income mobility" in the United States, where poor children grow up to be more affluent than their parents were, are in rural Minnesota and nearby states. Poor children in Minneapolis and St. Paul tend to stay poor, just as in most other big cities across the country.
Pressure is building to change that. Gov. Mark Dayton has prioritized a plan to reduce racial inequity and create more opportunities for low-income people. The U.S. Supreme Court faulted Dallas in 2015 for not steering enough affordable housing into affluent suburbs, and a similar legal challenge is underway in Minnesota.
But despite decades of effort to foster the equal opportunity at the core of the American dream, there remains a sharp debate about the best approach. Is the solution to make it easier for poor people to move to the suburbs? Can the barriers to success in the nation's inner cities be eliminated?
Beyond the broad questions, there are practical realities. Poor people may not want to move to the suburbs, and suburbs sometimes don't want them. There's only so much land available in affluent neighborhoods to build more housing of any type, and developers tend to pitch upscale projects.
"We have concentrations of poverty and we have concentrations of joblessness, and we've got concentrations of crime and we've got underperforming schools, and we sort of all know where that is," said Ed Goetz, director of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota. "And so the question then is what is the best way to address those problems."
Recent decisions by the Supreme Court and federal housing authorities swung the pendulum in favor of more aggressive housing integration. But Goetz himself is ambivalent about that as the sole solution, and the best way to bring economic opportunity to everyone in the United States remains an open, contested question.
Burnett and her children have lived the debate.
