2022 Proceedings

Broadband was highlighted as a critically important service in the pandemic. Although it is widely documented that availability is inconsistent across rural areas, pockets of neighborhoods in urban areas also lack access. We used the example of Milwaukee, Wisconsin a historically segregated city to show how residential segregation from the 1930’s is still reflected in health inequities in socioeconomic health metrics today. We used ArcGIS Pro to map several community socioeconomic metrics such as children in poverty, homeownership rates, and those who have completed high school, as well as historically redlined neighborhoods, against access to high-speed broadband to show the spatial patterns. We then transformed these maps into a gif to help users better overlay the different metrics. We find, unsurprisingly, that census tracts with lower percentages of broadband access are correlated with those in which more children live in poverty, fewer individuals own their homes or graduated high school, and were more likely to be redlined in the past. These findings point to the need to reduce the inequity in broadband access to avoid further harm to communities experiencing disinvestment.