640,223 affordable homes short for its poorest renters — the largest deficit in America. 893 million person-hours a year lost to congestion in the New York–Newark metro. $74.9 billion of water infrastructure need in the state's own assessments. 45% of its major roads poor or mediocre, 10% of its bridges structurally deficient, 11 upstate hospitals screening at risk, and 58,600 locations still waiting for broadband. The unbuilt New York, in nine lists.
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.
How this page was built: every measure is traced to a named source — the national research institutes that publish state-level series (NLIHC, TRIP, Feeding America, the USDA ERS, the Texas A&M Transportation Institute), the grid operator NYISO, or the state's own agencies and assessments (NYSDEC, NYSDOH, ConnectALL). A measure is printed only where its value, geography and year are all published; where a category has no honest statewide number, this page says so rather than estimating one.
Where the lines are drawn: New York's congestion problem is a metro problem, so traffic is printed at metro level and labelled as such — the New York–Newark urban area is a tri-state metro, not the state. Food insecurity is printed as a statewide USDA rate plus one labelled regional count, because no verified statewide person count was published. 'Rural hospitals' means upstate, and the screen printed is the Sheps Center's, with its methodology stated; no competing national screen publishes a New York count, so none is blended in. Both water figures are the state's own needs assessments and are labelled with their vintage — they are dated, and no newer statewide totals exist in the sources reviewed.
What to watch: the USDA has announced it will discontinue the household food-security survey, ending the series behind this page's food rate. The broadband count is a moving number — locations fall as BEAD-funded construction completes — and the dam counts rest on the National Inventory and the state inventory, neither of which publishes a statewide poor-condition share for New York. Severities are editorial judgements calibrated across all state pages, not statistics.