Frontline Blog

Fresh health data insights on lead poisoning, broadband access, and rent affordability in U.S. cities

May 2025

Lead education flyer hung on a Baltimore resident's front gate
Photo courtesy of Baltimore City Health Department
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New data and metrics on BCHC’s city data dashboard illuminate important trends in childhood blood lead levels, as well as health-related indicators such as healthy youth development, broadband access, and rent costs.

This Big Cities Health Inventory platform – managed in partnership with the Drexel Urban Health Collaborative (UHC) – includes more than 200,000 data points for over 125 metrics for BCHC’s 35 member cities.

The platform now includes available data for all metrics spanning the years 2010–2023.

Get a guided tour of the city data dashboard
Graphic showing headshot of Anneta Arno and Cities the Future of Health Webinar Series

Highlights from the new data and metrics

  • Childhood blood lead levels have declined in all cities over the past decade. However, rates remain high in cities with the highest rates of poverty and older housing. 
  • The percent of 16–19 year olds who are not in school and not working – a metric that correlates strongly to healthy youth development and community safety – has been mostly stable over time (on average, 8%, ranging from 3% to 15% across BCHC cities in 2023).
  • Internet access has doubled in big cities in the last decade, with the largest gains seen in lower-wealth cities like Detroit and Memphis. Still, as of 2023 approximately 1 out of 4 lower income households living in BCHC cities still lack broadband access. 
  • Rent costs increased most sharply in cities in California and the Pacific northwest and in Denver, which aligns with higher rates of homelessness in those cities.
Visit our city data dashboard

Platform boasts unique features

The data platform can be used to view health data over time for single cities, as well as to compare metrics across cities, and view racial and ethnic inequities across cities. Data can be downloaded as a CSV file or as single charts.

Compared to other platforms, the BCHI has newer data, three times as many metrics, city-level data, and data for racial and ethnic subgroups. The data – which mostly originates from over 25 federal and state sources – undergoes extensive data processing (harmonization, age-standardization, etc.) and quality checks to ensure comparability across cities and time.

Over the past 12 months, the platform has been used more than 60,000 times including to download data and charts. 

The Big Cities Health Inventory data platform is supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of a financial assistance award totaling $XX with 100 percent funded by CDC/HHS. The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement, by CDC/HHS, or the U.S. Government.

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