“Good old-fashioned redlining”: Why was Oakland cut out of state plan for high-speed internet?
“Good old-fashioned redlining”: Why was Oakland cut out of state plan for high-speed internet? The Mercury News
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California’s Efforts to Bridge the Digital Divide Fall Short in Urban Communities
Life Academy of Health and Bioscience juniors Santiago Preciado-Cruz, left, and Emeline Gutierrez talk about internet access during an interview on Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2023, in Oakland, Calif. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)
The Mission to Bridge the Digital Divide
OAKLAND — The mission was supposed to be simple: At a moment when millions of students were being educated exclusively online, California’s leaders decided that high-speed internet should be available everywhere, even in places where residents struggle to afford it.
So in 2021 the state directed millions in federal pandemic relief dollars and other funding– a total of $3.87 billion — to bridge the “digital divide” by installing fiber-optic cables that would bring high-speed internet to neighborhoods where it did not exist.
Two years later, those ambitious plans appear to have been slashed disproportionately, threatening to leave some urban communities, including East Oakland and South Central Los Angeles, further behind.
The Impact on Urban Communities
What was originally intended to be 28 miles of fiber connectivity along I-580, I-980 and State Route 185 — the last of which doubles as International Boulevard in Oakland — have been consolidated into a single strand that runs south of Lake Merritt and no longer cuts through the flatlands of East Oakland.
“A lot of it is just good old-fashioned redlining,” said Shayna Englin, a director with the Digital Equity Initiative, based in Los Angeles. “There are politics and relationships at play, who’s in the room for this complicated and massive set of data and decisions that all have to be made really, really quickly about a ton of money.”
The sociological disparities that exist in an increasingly digital world are well understood by East Oakland teenagers who entered their freshman year at Life Academy of Health and Bioscience remotely, relying on school-issued Chromebooks to get through those crucial, early high school years.
The students, who live with larger families in smaller spaces, are acquainted with the realities of how WiFi bandwidth suffer when five siblings hop on different Zoom classes or a teacher texts a student about how their assignments aren’t sending digitally.
“I’d drop off of calls all the time — and I missed a considerable amount of eighth grade because of that,” said Santiago Preciado-Cruz, a high-school junior who attends after-school courses at Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood.
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