The other ledger for Iowa: one bridge in five rated poor, a 61,867-home deficit for the poorest renters, one in eight residents food insecure in America's farm state, and a power grid told to grow 50% in five years. 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, 19 measures. Iowa's needs ledger is a study in farm-state arithmetic: the nation's heaviest bridge and dam inventories per road mile, a housing deficit concentrated at the very bottom incomes, hunger at one in eight residents in the state that feeds the country, and a power grid told to grow by half in five years because data centres found its cheap wind.
Where sources disagree or measure different things, both are printed and neither is averaged away. The hospitals category pairs CHQPR's closure-risk screen (9 at risk, 2 immediate) with Chartis's obstetrics count (22 rural facilities stopped offering OB between 2011 and 2023, the largest decline of any state) — different measures, labelled as such. The dams category does the same in the other direction: Iowa's high-hazard fleet shows zero poor-condition dams on the AP's records screen, so the page prints the hazard inventory and the low-head dam death record rather than inventing a condition crisis, and no poor-condition share is multiplied into a count anywhere on this page.
Metro, regional and utility figures are labeled as what they are: the traffic numbers are TTI's for Iowa's metro areas — no statewide congestion total exists, and none is printed — the power numbers are forecasts (Alliant's contracted load and MISO's zonal outlook, spanning a two-state service territory where no Iowa-only split is published), and the food category runs on Feeding America's food-insecurity estimates; no verified statewide USDA low-access tract count was published in the sources reviewed, so no food-desert resident count is printed. The broadband figures are the state's BEAD final-proposal numbers: eligible locations, not households.