Joseph Brown moved from West Baltimore to Columbia, Md., after a lawsuit found Maryland in violation of the Fair Housing Act. Lawrence Lanahan

COLUMBIA, Md. — Twelve-year-old Joseph Brown sits on the edge of his bed, gripping an Xbox controller. It’s Madden NFL with a Super Bowl matchup: the Seattle Seahawks against the Denver Broncos. The digital field, like the frigid parking lot outside Joe’s window, is covered in snow.

“Joe!” his mother yells from the living room. “You need to go and make your breakfast!”

It’s 8 a.m., but with Joe’s school opening two hours late, Nicole Smith is still in early-morning mode: T-shirt and pajama bottoms, hair up in bobby pins.

A single mom, Nicole just completed a degree in early childhood development at the local community college. She has been patching together part-time work around her studies and Joe’s schedule. Until 2009, Nicole and Joe lived in a poor neighborhood in Baltimore. Now they’re in Columbia, Md., half an hour away by car, but a world away in terms of opportunity.

At Joe’s former elementary school in Baltimore, 97 percent of the students are low income, and 97 percent are African-American. His middle school in Columbia is one-third low income, with white, Asian, Hispanic and multiracial students making up just over half the population. In their old Baltimore neighborhood, Nicole says, she saw a man get shot in the leg in front of a corner bar as she held baby Joe in her arms.

“Somebody’s always getting shot around there,” Joe adds.

Finally dressed for school, he puts on a bulky coat, grabs his school bag and strides through a placid apartment complex past license plates from many different states.

“People are coming from California, Ohio, Florida,” says Nicole. “It’s because of the job opportunities.”

If one were to color-code a map of the Baltimore region in terms of the opportunity available — jobs, safe neighborhoods, good schools — Nicole’s little corner of Columbia would look a lot different from her former home in West Baltimore.