The District needs a $43.19-an-hour wage to afford a fair-market two-bedroom home, is short 37,531 homes for its poorest renters, loses 90 hours a year to regional traffic, still has 41,157 lead water lines to replace, and has watched residential electricity prices rise 94% in five years.
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. The District's profile is a dense city's: a top-six housing wage and a 37,531-home shortage for its poorest renters, top-five national congestion costs, a five-figure lead-pipe inventory and a near-doubling of electricity prices in five years — set against two of the smallest gaps in this series, broadband (109 unserved locations) and structurally deficient bridges (1.6%).
Two of the nine categories are honestly empty, and both gaps are structural rather than editorial. Hospitals: the District has no rural hospitals — it is entirely urban — and no current District-wide hospital-access measure meeting this page's bar could be verified, so the category prints its reasoning (including the April 2025 opening of Cedar Hill, the first full-service hospital east of the Anacostia) instead of a borrowed or stale figure. Dams: the District's inventoried dams are a handful of small structures, national high-hazard tabulations publish no District count, and no District dam-condition summary could be retrieved — the category is left empty with an editorial severity band rather than padded. Both empty categories follow the honestly-empty precedent used elsewhere in this series.
Three labelling disciplines run through the page. Traffic is TTI's Washington, DC-VA-MD urban area — a three-jurisdiction metro geography — printed as such and never relabelled District-only. Water is built on DC Water's own Lead Free DC needs assessment because EPA's District-level drinking-water needs figure could not be retrieved in verifiable form; the two DC Water cost figures ($1.51B planning scope, $1.8B full program) are both printed with their scopes rather than blended. Power prices are EIA's monthly series carried by a news analysis, flagged on the measures — and the category's fine print prints the counterweight, that District outage reliability is among the nation's best, so the score reflects price exposure only.