Broadband and Cities
Progress in closing the digital divide is greatest where poverty rates are declining the most
Broadband may not be able to solve all the problems relating to social inequality and poverty, but addressing them is likely to be much harder if substantial portions of the low-income population lack broadband access at home. New analysis of broadband adoption in a selection of cities shows a strong relationship between low household broadband adoption levels and poverty. The analysis also shows that rising economic tides in cities has little to do with recent growth in broadband adoption – but that declines in poverty rates do.
The analysis -- conducted for the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition and the Kansas City Public Library -- focused on Kansas City because of its role as Google’s first “Fiber City.” The research, using American Community Survey (ACS) data, compared Kansas City (the combined cities in Missouri and Kansas) to a set of comparable cites on broadband adoption. As Google’s first Fiber City in 2011, Kansas City became a focal point for discussion on the digital divide, in part because Google brought resources to help address the problem. Did the digital divide narrow from 2013 to 2018 more rapidly in Kansas City than in other comparable cities?
The answer, for Kansas City, is mixed. In 2013, 67.1% of households in Kansas City had broadband compared with 72.7% of all households in the United States. By 2018, the gap had narrowed substantially: 84.1% of homes in Kansas City had broadband of any kind, nearly the same rate as the nation (85.1%).
The numbers for low-income households are not as encouraging. For Kansas City households whose annual incomes were $20,000 or less annually, 40.4% had broadband in 2013, a figure that grew to 56.0% in 2017 (the most recent year for ACS data on broadband by income). Although that represents strong growth, the 15.6 percentage point increase trails the 18.3 percentage point gain for a set of comparable cities used in the analysis.