Okay, that last post was the bad news from the American Community Survey data released Thursday. Now here’s the good news:

Among cities with 100,000 or more households, the two worst-connected cities, Detroit and Cleveland, have also had the biggest percentage reductions in households without wireline broadband connections since 2019.

Detroit added more than 41,000 households with cable, fiber or DSL subscriptions between 2019 and 2023, even while its total household count shrank by about 12,000; this took the city’s percentage of households without wireline from 46.3% down to 32.2%. In the same four years Cleveland added almost 25,000 wireline broadband accounts while losing about 3,000 households, reducing its no-wireline percentage from 46.0% to 32.2%.

As the chart shows, most of these gains happened between 2019 and 2021, the years of COVID lockdowns and mass enforced participation in online education, work and commerce. The second half of 2021 also brought the Federal Emergency Broadband Benefit program, which by the end of the year was helping about 82,000 households in Cuyahoga County and 108,000 in Wayne County pay for either wireless or wireline Internet.

By the time the EBB morphed into the Affordable Connectivity Program in January 2022, schools, workplaces, restaurants and churches had re-opened, but the increase in home broadband connections remained, and even continued to grow modestly — undoubtedly a success marker for the ACP.

Of course this sequence of events happened in cities throughout the country, but not necessarily to the same extent.  To get a better perspective on this year’s “worst-connected” list and how the urban digital divide has changed since the beginning of the pandemic, CYC has used the same data set — ACS Table B28002, “Presence and Types of Internet Subscriptions in Household” — to compare the same large U.S. cities’ degree of improvement in home connectivity since 2019.

This new analysis looks at one of the two ACS statistics featured in all of our Worst Connected Large Cities reports — the percentage of households in each community that lack subscriptions for cable, fiber optic or DSL broadband Internet services, otherwise known as “wireline” broadband.

1. We calculated the decrease (or increase) in the number of households with no wireline broadband service from 2019 to 2023, for each of the eighty cities included in our 2019 WCLC analysis.
2.  We averaged the total number of households in 2019 and 2023 for each city.
3.  We divided the numerical decrease (or increase) in “no wireline” households by the averaged total of all households to get each city’s improvement percentage.
4.  We ranked the eighty cities by these percentages, from “most improved” (the biggest percentage decrease in no-wireline households) to “least improved” (the smallest percentage decrease or biggest increase).

Here’s what we got:

U.S. cities above 100,000 households with most improved home wireline broadband percentages, 2023 vs 2019

Here are the ten “most improved” cities for home wireline broadband:

Seven of these ten most-improved cities (Detroit, Cleveland, Memphis, New Orleans, Miami. Toledo and St. Louis) were among the ten worst-connected in 2019; Milwaukee ranked 11th on that list and Fresno ranked 16th.   Six of them were still among the ten worst-connected for 2023, and three more were in last year’s top 20.

In other words, some of the greatest progress has happened in cities — like Cleveland! — that needed it most, and still do.

That’s a credit to the community digital inclusion movements in those cities, to the many local governments and school boards that rose to the occasion in  2020 and 2021 to help school families and others get connected during the lockdowns, and to the Internet providers who stepped up to help with affordable plans and collaborations.  And it’s strong evidence of the effectiveness of the Emergency Broadband Benefit and Affordable Connectivity Program in  communities where the need for affordable broadband is greatest… while they lasted.

Now in 2024 the big question is: Will the improved home broadband access rates in Cleveland, Detroit, and other U.S. cities survive the end of the ACP, and the resulting bigger monthly bills that started hitting many of their newly connected households in June?