Guam needs a $30.56-an-hour wage to afford a fair-market two-bedroom home, runs its only public hospital on 158 acute beds for 170,000 people, feeds one in four residents through SNAP, pays 34.91 cents a kilowatt-hour for oil-fired power, and faces a $1.22 billion water bill.
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. Guam's profile is an island-territory profile: the standard mainland instruments either do not cover it or do not publish territory tables, so this page substitutes the territory's own instruments — the Census Bureau's Island Areas Census, HUD's territory Fair Market Rents, NREL's territory energy baseline, FHWA's territory bridge table and the territory agencies' own programmes — and labels every substitution rather than smoothing it over.
Three categories are published honestly empty, and each says why. Traffic: the Texas A&M Transportation Institute's Urban Mobility Report covers mainland urban areas and publishes no Guam figure; Guam's measurable transport burden is its bridge fleet, printed under Roads & bridges. Dams: the National Inventory of Dams lists very few Guam structures and no territory-wide count or condition census could be verified; the one published dam, the Navy's high-hazard Fena Dam in fair condition, is named in the category rather than inflated into a fleet. Food: the USDA Food Access Research Atlas and Feeding America's Map the Meal Gap do not cover Guam, so no food-insecurity rate is printed — the category prints food-assistance reliance (one in four residents on SNAP) and labels it as a proxy, not a rate. Hospitals carries the same discipline: CHQPR publishes no Guam screen, so the category prints Guam's actual capacity — one public hospital, 158 licensed acute beds, about 1.9 beds per 1,000 island-wide.
Instruments are never blended: the Census housing burden (34.0% of renters) and the HUD fair-market rent ($1,589) sit side by side, with the $30.56 housing wage labelled as a computation from the HUD figure by NLIHC's method because NLIHC publishes no Guam page; GWA's $1.22B capital programme is printed as a needs-assessment here and as a programme record on the What's Being Built page without being added to itself; and broadband prints the Census subscription share (85.9% of households, 2020) beside the NTIA allocation ($155.6M) rather than merging a household share into a location count. News-flagged: one measure rests on news reporting of official figures — the island beds-per-1,000 figure (Marianas Business Journal analysis) — and is flagged on its record.
Severity scores are editorial (0–100 band), calibrated against the other places in this series — Guam's range (35–78) reflects a territory whose worst problems are a single-hospital system, oil-priced power, a $1.22B water bill and a renter burden above a third of all renters, and whose broadband and dam numbers are genuinely among the milder or emptier in the series.