Delaware's unbuilt list, in published numbers: a 14,417-home shortage for its poorest renters, ≈$2.7B of water-infrastructure need, 57 high-hazard dams, 36% of major roads in poor or mediocre condition — and a power grid that retired its last coal unit in 2025 just as PJM forecasts ≈32 GW of new peak load by 2030.
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.
Nine categories, 18 measures — every one a published figure with its source, year, geography and measure class attached (hard counts, modeled estimates and needs assessments are labelled as what they are). Delaware is the second-smallest state, and several national datasets report it thinly; where a dataset does not publish a Delaware figure, the page says so instead of borrowing a neighbour's. The honest shape of the state's unbuilt list: no rural-hospital crisis on the published screens, the nation's near-best bridge condition, and a funded broadband close-out — set against a 14,417-home deficit for the poorest renters, ≈$2.7B of assessed water need, and a power transition Delaware does not control.
Where sources disagree, both figures are printed rather than one being silently chosen: bridges are 1% poor on TRIP's April 2026 FHWA analysis and 3.2% structurally deficient on ASCE's older Delaware dataset; high-hazard dams are 57 on the current National Inventory of Dams and 63 on ASCE's Delaware page, while the state's own regulator covers 45 dams; food insecurity is 10.8% of households on the USDA survey and 12.6% of people on Feeding America's model; and broadband's eligible-location count is 5,721 under the January 2025 BEAD approval and 4,728 connections under the revised March 2026 approval. Vintages are printed on every measure — the USDA food-security survey series was discontinued after its 2024 report, so that figure will age in place.
Three categories are labelled for what they are. Traffic is urban-area measurement, not a statewide total — and Delaware's largest metro, Wilmington, has no Delaware-only figure because TTI counts it inside Philadelphia's large-metro tables. Power is a regional exposure (all of Delaware sits inside PJM) anchored by one hard Delaware fact: the 410 MW of coal capacity retired at Indian River in February 2025. And Rural Hospitals is deliberately the thinnest category on the page: Delaware's fleet is three downstate general hospitals, mostly not rural-designated, the national screens cover two of them, and no Delaware vulnerability count is published — the category prints the zero-closure record and the margin screen, and its defnote says what it cannot show.