On Tuesday, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors approved legislation authorizing the city to expand free, high-speed internet access throughout Chinatown, the Tenderloin, and the Bayview.
Access to affordable, high-speed internet is lacking in higher-poverty neighborhoods like Chinatown, according to a March report from local nonprofit Chinese for Affirmative Action.
The organization's research found, for example, that nearly half of Chinatown households don’t have broadband internet subscriptions, and those who do find their internet to be slow and unreliable. The report also found that the same internet provider offers speeds up to six times higher in North Beach than it does in Chinatown.
Last week, the board’s Budget and Finance Committee signed off on a resolution that enables the city’s technology department to accept $10 million in grant money to expand broadband internet access to underserved homes and businesses in those neighborhoods. The money comes from the California Public Utilities Commission, by way of a federal grant designed to expand internet access.
At a press event in Chinatown last week, Peskin spoke about the irony of a lack of broadband in San Francisco, home to some of the most consequential tech companies in the world.
“It is really a tale of two cities,” Supervisor Aaron Peskin, whose district includes Chintown, said at the presser. “There are some that have access to some of the highest-speed internet, and parts of San Francisco that virtually have no access at all.”
The city plans to use the grant to expand its pre-existing Fiber to Housing program, which runs on the city’s own fiber optic cables. The program has already connected more than 10,000 housing units to free high-speed internet since 2018, including affordable housing developments and single-room occupancy hotels, according to the program’s site.
The expansion will bring fiber internet to an estimated 40,000 low-income residents in Chinatown, the Bayview, and the Tenderloin, according to Jennifer Chan, a director with the Chinatown Community Development Center.
“Low-income neighborhoods here in San Francisco have been historically left behind,” Chan said at the press conference.
Once the city has the supervisors’ approval to accept funding for the project, officials must obtain permission from property owners to install the needed infrastructure for high-speed internet. From there, the city’s technology department could get the service up and running in as little as two months, Calvin Yan, a legislative aide for Peskin, told Gazetteer SF.
Getting permission from property owners will likely be the biggest hurdle for the program, Yan said. In 2021, Peskin successfully spearheaded a pilot program to connect residents of single-room occupancy units in Chinatown to the city’s existing fiber network. It took “quite a long time to convince different property owners that this was actually a good thing,” Peskin told Gazetteer.
Peskin said he envisions similar hurdles with this broader expansion, noting “the education curve is steep,” but that the program will ultimately add value to the properties included in the program.
Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect the Board of Supervisors adopted the legislation on Tuesday.