SF Chinatown struggles with low broadband penetration

Every day, Kai Tsui, 69, walks three blocks from his home, a Chinatown single-room-occupancy hotel, to the Mark Him Lai library when it opens to use its Wi-Fi. Tsui’s SRO has no internet, so he heads to the library for everything from staying up on the news to checking his bank account to working on his novel. 

“It’s like my second home,” Tsui said. 

The San Francisco neighborhood might be nestled in the tech capital of the world, but just 63% of its residents have a broadband plan of any kind, according to American Community Survey data from 2017 to 2021. In its poorest census tract, just 51% have one. In addition to the area being home to many SROs and low-income residents who struggle to afford internet plans, a high number of old buildings make broadband infrastructure upgrades difficult and expensive. An intricate and opaque patchwork of building ownership complicates efforts to rally collective action.

“It’s a Herculean lift,” said Reymon LaChaux, the digital equity manager in the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development. “You can see the infrastructure challenges just walking around.” 

Chinatown isn’t the only area of San Francisco with low broadband penetration, but it is the most densely populated, while also being a magnet for tourists and city residents for its cultural events, restaurants and shops that are hampered by limited connectivity. The neighborhood has 900 businesses crammed within 28 square blocks, and many still rely on dial-up internet connections, some of which are too slow to process credit card transactions or sustain a security-camera video stream. 

Local officials and activists have chipped away at Chinatown’s internet problem for years through initiatives to wire public-housing buildings, distribute refurbished devices, and boost technological skills, but the problem persists with only modest progress.  

The result, say community leaders, is greater difficulty for residents to get services, jobs and to integrate into daily American life.

“High-speed internet access is a very important aspect of our community not being discriminated against and overlooked,” said Anni Chung, executive director of the nonprofit Self Help for the Elderly.

“We’re in 2023 and full civic participation is happening in so many realms,” added Malcolm Yeung, executive director of the nonprofit Chinatown Community Development Center. “Without having full access there’s going to be political estrangement.” 

Locals often use the library’s internet for critical online tasks like applying for housing or government benefits, according to Chinatown Branch Manager Chao Qun Huang. Such benefits are lifelines for the neighborhood’s population, which has a high proportion of low income renters, many of whom are also monolingual immigrants. Chinatown residents make just over $27,000 a year on average and the neighborhood contains around 15,000 SRO units across hundreds of buildings, where many immigrants first settle when arriving in the city. 

Three years ago, Comcast held meetings with community leaders, including Yeung and Chung, to tackle how to bring the neighborhood more online. Though there was serious interest from Comcast and neighborhood leaders, the conversations didn’t yield action, in part because property owners didn’t want to pay for infrastructure upgrades, according to Chung. Following major construction on Chinatown’s hospital and the Chinatown-Rose Pak Station, Comcast was hesitant to add another disruptive project to the dense neighborhood, according to Yeung. 

The problem resists easy fixes. An internet service provider must first bring its fiber to the doorstep of a given building, which can involve digging into the street. From there, bringing service to a household requires buy-in from a wide array of stakeholders including landlords, building managers, tenants and city agencies. Boring holes in brick and concrete walls is difficult and expensive. 

“One of the challenges unique to historic Chinatown is that the area includes older buildings that require upgrading their inside wiring from twisted copper wires to fiber. Our work depends on the building owner’s commitment to make the necessary upgrades,” said an AT&T spokesperson.  

The high concentration of aging SRO buildings presents additional challenges. Many of the buildings are so cut up into small rooms with many walls that routers don’t work effectively. For hotel Wi-Fi style internet pilot projects organized by Supervisor Aaron Peskin’s office, it was necessary to install two routers per floor because the many brick walls interfered with the signals, according to aide Calvin Yan.

Many of Chinatown’s SRO buildings are privately owned, leaving discretion about making building upgrades to the owners. The residents in those buildings are very low income, many collecting social security insurance income, which is capped at $1,134 a month. 

“They’re not going to buy a broadband plan,” Chung said. 

With many SRO units rent-controlled, building owners aren’t collecting much money and are often reluctant to sink cash into upgrades, said Chung. Most landlords benefit from maintaining the status quo, and many are cautious about outside scrutiny, especially from government agencies. 

Although the lowest broadband penetration in the city is in a Bayview census tract, digital inequity has proven more difficult to remedy in Chinatown than elsewhere. The hilly topography of the neighborhood even makes it more complicated to install overhead fiber lines, which has been possible in other neighborhoods like the Bayview, according to Brian Roberts, policy analyst at the city Department of Technology. 

Raising awareness of the broadband options available has also proven challenging, according to the AT&T spokesperson. For instance, many people aren’t aware of the federal Affordable Connectivity Program, which subsidizes low income households with up to $30 per month to offset the cost of a plan. Other initiatives to distribute laptops and other devices run by internet service providers or community organizations are often piecemeal and small-scale. 

Alternative wireless options avoid some infrastructure woes and forestall the need to dig up the street. Local provider Monkeybrains delivers service via an antenna on a building’s roof, which picks up a wireless signal from a city-wide network. Wiring then brings the connection to a given unit. The provider has worked with the city to set up successful internet pilots in affordable housing buildings and has 80 buildings online in Chinatown, according to Co-Founder Rudy Rucker. 

However, the company advertises in English, which may not reach monolingual Chinatown residents. Other factors like the neighborhood’s fishbowl-shaped topography and uneven building heights can obstruct an antenna’s connection to the wireless network. Further, installation hinges on roof access, which isn’t a given in Chinatown. 

Ownership of buildings in Chinatown is complicated and obscure, and that makes it surprisingly hard to get onto a building’s roof, said Lily Ho, founder and president of Delta Chinatown Collaborative. She knows because she has gone through that headache when pushing efforts to improve broadband coverage in the community. 

New federal funds for broadband infrastructure projects could make a dent in the problem, some officials and advocates hope. The city’s Department of Technology has applied for a $10.2 million grant, which, the agency projects, could help bring much more of the neighborhood online, along with swaths of the Bayview and Tenderloin. In a new model, the city would serve as the internet service provider for privately-owned SRO buildings, as it has already done successfully in small-scale pilots.