The other ledger for Ohio: 265,505 affordable homes missing for the poorest renters, 422 high-hazard dams with 132 of them also in poor condition, $31.9 billion of water-system need, and a data-centre power queue that peaked at more than 30 gigawatts of requests in one utility's territory. 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. Ohio's needs ledger is a study in contrasts: the nation's seventh-largest state highway system in mid-pack condition (33% of major roads poor or mediocre, 5% of bridges deficient) alongside the bottom-of-the-market failures that dominate the page — a 265,505-home deficit for the poorest renters, $31.9B of combined water need, 422 high-hazard dams, and 72,375 broadband locations assigned to the state's BEAD deployment round against a $793M federal allocation.
Where sources disagree, both are printed and neither is averaged away. Two rural-hospital screens give different pictures for Ohio — the Sheps Center's 2025 Senate-requested screen names 11 hospitals, while Chartis's wider vulnerability model bands Ohio at 16–20% of rural hospitals — and no verified statewide count of Ohio rural hospital closures since 2010 was published in the sources reviewed, so no closure count is printed as fact. The dams category prints ASCE's 422 high-hazard count alongside the National Inventory of Dams' own 421, an edition difference of one dam, disclosed on the measures. The food category prints no food-desert resident count, because no verified statewide USDA low-access tract count was published in the sources reviewed.
Metro and utility figures are labeled as what they are: the traffic numbers are TTI's for the full Columbus and Cleveland urban areas (the same table puts tri-state Cincinnati at 50 hours, Akron at 42, Toledo at 37 and Dayton at 32), and the power numbers are AEP Ohio's — one utility's territory and one regulator's docket, in which interconnection requests are applications rather than commitments and the 5 GW-by-2030 figure is a forecast built from signed agreements. The broadband count is the restructured BEAD programme's awarded location set, not the far larger eligibility pool Ohio counted before NTIA's 2025 restructuring.