Only 27 affordable homes exist for every 100 of Colorado's poorest renter households, its water systems need $31.3 billion over two decades, and 96,090 locations still wait for broadband — half of them assigned to satellite.
How to read this page: the class chip on every measure is the honesty label. Counted = an inspection or enumeration record. Modeled = a study's projection or risk score — printed with the modeler's name. Assessed = a structured survey of required investment — needs as documented, not measurements of decay. Figures keep the form their source gave them; years are printed on every measure.
Click any category to expand it — every measure with its figure, what it means in plain language, and its source.
Every measure carries its value, class, geography, year, definition, context and source. Colorado's profile is a housed-but-unaffordable, water-short state: its worst score is housing (a 136,324-home deficit for its poorest renters, 27 homes per 100 households), followed by water, where the federal surveys price a $31.3B two-decade need on top of a structural east-west supply imbalance. Its bridges (5% poor) and its rural-hospital closure record (zero closures since 2015) are genuinely healthier than most states in this series, and the scores say so.
Three honesty notes are printed rather than smoothed over. Hospitals: only the CHQPR screen is published in a Colorado-specific form we could verify, so no second screen is blended in or invented; the single-source basis is stated in the category's fine print. Traffic: the category carries one statewide measure — TTI's Denver-Aurora per-commuter figure could not be verified in a readable published table, so no metro number is printed. Food: the food category uses the current Map the Meal Gap 2026 edition (2024 data, released July 2026) rather than the 2025 edition; its child rate and people count arrive via a republication of Feeding America's state table and are flagged on their measures as the category's softest figures.
Water prints two federal instruments and one state synthesis side by side, labelled: EPA's needs surveys ($12.1B drinking water, $19.2B wastewater over 20 years, via the Water Program Portal) and ASCE's narrower $6.2B wastewater maintenance estimate in the fine print — never averaged. Power prints no interconnection-queue figure, because no Colorado-specific LBNL Queued Up total is published; the category rests on ASCE's outage and storage findings instead. Broadband prints the BEAD location total as the sum of the Broadband Office's published technology breakdown (96,090), and says so on the measure.