Every broadband location in the Northern Mariana Islands — 9,568 of them, 100% — is classified unserved or underserved; power costs up to 33 cents a kilowatt-hour from imported oil; one in five households receives nutrition assistance; and the housing stock is still counting 545 homes destroyed in 2018.
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.
Every measure carries its value, class, geography, year, definition, context and source. The CNMI's profile is a territory's profile: the national instruments that structure this series for states — TTI congestion tables, NLIHC's The Gap, Map the Meal Gap, ASCE state fact sheets, FHWA state bridge tables, CHQPR and Chartis hospital screens — mostly do not publish a Northern Mariana Islands line at all. Where a CNMI-specific federal instrument exists, it is printed: the HUD CDBG-DR needs assessment for housing, the Census Bureau's Island Areas Census and USDA FNS's NAP summary for food, the DOI/NREL energy baseline and DOE territory page for power, and the CNMI's own BEAD plan for broadband. Where none exists, the category is published honestly empty rather than filled with a borrowed stateside figure.
Five categories are unpublished, and each says why in its own fine print. Traffic: TTI publishes no CNMI area, and no local delay figure could be verified. Hospitals: the Commonwealth has exactly one hospital; the national at-risk screens do not cover it, and no sourced capacity or margin figure could be verified — the concentration risk is described, not numbered. Water & sewer: no EPA/ASCE needs total exists for the CNMI; the verified recovery spend ($81.1M of FEMA Public Assistance to CUC) and the 2026 EPA PFAS and lead-pipe grants are stated in the category note, not dressed as a needs survey. Roads & bridges: FHWA publishes no CNMI condition table and the inventory is a handful of structures. Dams: the Commonwealth has essentially no dam fleet — groundwater, not reservoirs, supplies its water — and the National Inventory of Dams records no significant CNMI inventory. Five honest empties out of nine is the designed outcome for this page, not a research failure.
Severity scores are editorial (0–100 band), calibrated against the other jurisdictions in this series and grounded only in the cited CNMI data: broadband scores highest (88) because the unserved share is literally total — 100% of locations — even though the remedy is funded and contracted; power (82) on a $0.19–$0.33/kWh price range over an oil-fired, unconnected grid; housing (72) on the Commonwealth's own disaster needs assessment. The empty categories carry structural bands, each labelled editorial and each explained on its category — a low dams score (10) reflects the near-absence of dams, while mid-range bands for hospitals (55), water (60) and roads (45) reflect described fragility without verified counts, and are not comparable to the measured scores printed for states.