How the Pandemic Heightened the Digital Divide in New York City

Nine months into the pandemic, as positivity rates rise again through the city, as parents struggle with the administration’s oscillating arrangements over in-person schooling; remote learning has heightened obstacles students from low income neighborhoods have faced compared to students in more affluent areas in New York City.

A notable one: access to reliable internet at home.

“This has been an ongoing issue with the New York City Department of Education, you know, for a decade or more,” said Dr. Stephen Brier, a professor of urban education and the founder of the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate program at the CUNY Graduate Center. “A serious issue, revealed in even starker terms by the COVID crisis.”

In 2019, 29% of New York City households – 917,239 households, or 2.2 million people – lacked broadband internet access, according to a report by Comptroller Scott Stringer, mostly affecting communities of color in “underserved” and low median income neighborhoods.

“When you think of the internet ramping up in the middle of the 90s, we're a good 25 years into this digital era and we still have not figured [out], in New York City, how to do it properly in the public sector,” Brier said. “How do you do remote learning without decent access? It becomes very difficult for students who are falling behind.”

Data analyzed from the American Community Survey show that broadband internet – the type of connection that transfers data at a high-speed – is mostly concentrated in higher income neighborhoods. On the Upper East Side-Carnegie Hill (Census Tract 148.02) – where the median household income is $124K – over 92% of households have broadband internet. In Morrisania-Melrose, in the Bronx (Census Tract 141) – where the median household income is $31.3K – about 71% of households have broadband access.

In March, Chalkbeat reported that around 300,000 students were without internet access as schools were gearing up for remote learning. As the DOE began distributing internet connected tablets to public school children for class, by mid-October, there were still 77,000 requests that had yet to be fulfilled according to Gothamist.

Only weeks before the pandemic swept through the city, the de Blasio administration announced an “Internet Master Plan” that would provide wider access to broadband internet to New Yorkers – starting in areas with gaps in access – and would serve as a step towards overcoming the digital divide.

But until then, New Yorkers are turning to free public WiFi as a way to stay connected.

Fritzi Bodenheimer, the press officer for the Brooklyn Public Library, said that while their buildings were closed between April 1st and October 31st, they recorded about 270,000 WiFi sessions across their 59 branches.

“Halfway through that [time frame], our buildings were open for staff, but that cannot account for any significant portion of that number,” she said. “That’s all people...It’s definitely a significant number that that many sessions while the doors were closed – that’s huge.”

Bodenheimer pointed out that even before the pandemic, she had noticed a number of people lingering outside the buildings soaking up the connection.

The map below shows the percent change in the number of WiFi sessions per year between 2013 and 2016. The dark green dots show the branch locations where the BPL recorded an increase in sessions. The Stone Avenue Library branch in Brownsville saw a 160% increase in yearly sessions – from 1,892 sessions in the 2014 financial year, to 4,911 in the 2016 financial year.

“If we closed for the evening, or if it was early Sunday morning, you could always see people standing outside the library, like, working on their phones or tablets or whatever, and they would do so using our signal by standing outside,” Bodenheimer said. “We made a decision early on to keep our WiFi on even when the buildings were closed, and we had huge numbers of WiFi sessions. So people were in need of that signal and they were using ours.”

Last month, the Brooklyn Public Library began installing rooftop antenas at 14 locations as part of their "Bklyn Reach" iniative. The antenas extend the WiFi reach up to 300 feet from the libraries, providing internet to more residents in neighborhoods in need, according to the press release.

In late November, multiple families currently staying in homeless shelters sued the city over its elongated plan to install WiFi in shelters across the city, arguing that it would take too long and their children will be too far behind if the city installs WiFi in shelters by the end of the academic year, according to the New York Daily News.

“Let's hope we treat this as an opportunity to fix things moving forward because we've been blithely ignoring this problem for now several decades,” Brier said. “If we don't learn the lessons from this crisis and apply them moving forward, we're just doomed to repeat the same thing over and over and over again.”