The other ledger for New Jersey: 99 hours a year lost in the nation's third-worst traffic, a 197,110-home deficit for its poorest renters, and $76.6 billion of water need — in a state whose rural-hospital screens come back empty and whose grid operator is bracing for 30 gigawatts of data centres. 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, 18 measures. New Jersey's needs ledger is a tale of two states: a dense, wealthy corridor state whose rural screens come back empty and whose roads and bridges grade near the middle of the national pack — carrying, at the same time, a 197,110-home deficit for its poorest renters, a $76.6B water need, and commuters inside the third-most-congested metro in America.
Where sources disagree, both are printed and neither is averaged away. Food is the clearest case: the USDA survey puts New Jersey's household food-insecurity rate at 9.8%, among the nation's lowest, while Feeding America's modelling counts 1,239,340 food-insecure residents in 2024, 13.0% of the state and nearly double the 2020 share — different instruments measuring related things, printed side by side with their universes labelled. The dams category is handled the same way: ASCE's fact sheet counts 232 high-hazard dams and the state's own mitigation plan counts 231, and the one-dam difference is printed, not smoothed.
Three honest gaps are printed rather than filled. Rural hospitals: New Jersey has very few rural-designated hospitals and both national screens (CHQPR, Sheps) find essentially none at risk — the category says so, scores low, and points at the urban safety-net risk its definition excludes. Power: PJM publishes load growth for its 13-state region, not for New Jersey alone, so the region's figures are printed and labelled as the region's. Broadband: no verified statewide BEAD-eligible location count was published in the sources reviewed, so the category prints the $263.7M allocation and the measured city-level access gap instead of inventing a locations figure.