The other ledger for North Dakota: a state that leads the nation on food security, housing supply and broadband — and still carries a $4.1 billion water need, 54 high-hazard dams graded D, and a data-centre pipeline asking for as much power as its entire coal fleet makes. 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. North Dakota's needs ledger is, by national standards, a short one — the nation's lowest household food-insecurity rate, its second-best affordable-housing supply ratio, its smallest remaining broadband count, and a rural-hospital fleet in the lowest vulnerability band — set against a $4.1B water need and a power system suddenly asked to absorb a data-centre pipeline the size of its entire coal fleet.
Where sources disagree, both are printed and neither is averaged away. Food is the clearest case: the USDA survey puts North Dakota's household food-insecurity rate at 9.0%, the nation's lowest, while Feeding America's modelling counts 91,000+ food-insecure residents in 2024, up from about 36,000 in 2020 — different instruments measuring related things, printed side by side with their universes labelled. The dams category is handled the same way: the high-hazard count is a hard NID inventory figure, while the poor-condition share comes from the AP's NID analysis, in which nearly half of the state's high-hazard dams have condition withheld or uninspected — the missing assessments are part of the story, and no share is multiplied into a count.
Metro and pipeline figures are labelled as what they are: the traffic numbers are TTI's for the Grand Forks and Fargo urban areas — no statewide congestion total exists, and none is printed — and the power numbers are a tracked-proposal pipeline compiled for a legislative committee, not a utility forecast or a measured shortage. The broadband category is the honest inverse of most states': the $130M allocation is a formula figure, and the need is the 301 locations it will mostly not be needed to connect.