Thirty-three affordable homes per 100 of Idaho's poorest renter households, 43% of major roads in poor or mediocre shape, a $5.7 billion water bill and 91,469 locations still waiting on broadband — in the fastest-growing state in America.
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. Idaho's profile is a fast-growth state's: its sharpest need is housing for its poorest renters (33 affordable homes per 100 extremely low-income households), its broadest is the 43% of major roads in poor or mediocre condition, and its mildest is power — a hydro-rich system with the state's best ASCE grade. Population grew 29% from 2010 to 2025, the fastest in the nation, and most of these needs are that growth arriving at systems built for a smaller state.
Three honesty notes are printed rather than smoothed over. Traffic: the statewide and metro instruments genuinely differ — Reason's statewide peak-hour average (7.45 hours, among America's lowest) and TRIP/TTI's Boise urban-area delay (48 hours per driver) measure different things and are printed side by side, labelled, never averaged; TTI publishes no Boise per-commuter row we could source. Dams: two aggregations of the same National Inventory of Dams count 102 and 105 Idaho high-hazard dams, and condition reporting is too incomplete to print a poor-condition share — the variance and the gap are stated on the category. Food: the printed figures are Map the Meal Gap 2025 (2023 data) as tasked; The Idaho Foodbank's website now displays a newer edition's higher figures (14.2% overall), disclosed in the category fine print rather than blended in.
Hospitals carry a zero that matters: Idaho has had no rural hospital closure since 2015, and only 1 of 27 rural hospitals is at immediate risk — the category's mid-band score rests on the 52% of rural hospitals losing money on patient services and on maternity care thinning (3 L&D closures since 2020, a 39-minute median drive), not on realised closures. Broadband uses the Final Proposal round's 91,469 eligible locations as the count of record and discloses both the larger original fabric count (92,471 unserved plus 63,723 underserved) and the October 2026 provider withdrawals that sent 25,393 locations back out to bid. Power prints generation shares rather than a dollar need because no verifiable state grid-need figure is published; the shares are EIA data read through a secondary publisher, and that is labelled on the measures.