The other ledger for Illinois: a 289,616-home deficit for its poorest renters, Chicago drivers losing 102 hours a year to the joint-worst congestion in America, $29.7 billion of water need, and state regulators projecting power shortfalls from 2029 as data-centre demand surges. Every figure is sourced, dated, and labeled — counted, modeled, or assessed.
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, 20 measures. Illinois's needs split along the state's defining line: a Chicago region with the joint-worst traffic in America (102 hours lost per driver), a 224,445-home low-income housing deficit in the Chicago metro alone, and a power grid whose own state study projects shortfalls from 2029 — against a downstate of 1,633 dams with almost no public condition data, 142,546 broadband locations still unserved, and rural hospitals under margin pressure. The statewide housing deficit of 289,616 homes for the poorest renters is the single largest figure on the page.
Where sources disagree, both are printed and neither is averaged away. Two dam counts circulate — ASCE's 2025 fact sheet prints 250 high-hazard dams, the current National Inventory of Dams pull counts 252; the NID figure is used and the difference disclosed. Two rural-hospital risk vintages differ — CHQPR's January 2025 reporting counted 10 Illinois hospitals at risk (6 immediate) among 74 rural hospitals, its January 2026 dataset counts 16 at risk and 8 at immediate risk — and the Sheps closure count (4 since 2005) and CHQPR's closure count (3 since 2015) use different windows by design. The dams category prints no poor-condition share because Illinois does not publish condition ratings for its fleet; the 98.8% withheld figure is printed instead, labeled as a reporting gap.
Metro, zone and utility figures are labeled as what they are: the traffic numbers are INRIX's for the Chicago urban area only — Illinois congestion is a Chicago story and no statewide figure is printed; the power numbers are the State of Illinois's own 2025 Resource Adequacy Study forecasts for the ComEd (PJM) and Ameren (MISO) zones, which are grid footprints, not measurements of a shortage today; and the food category runs on Feeding America's food-insecurity estimates, because no verified statewide USDA low-access tract count was published in the sources reviewed, so no food-desert resident count is printed.