Oregon has the nation's second-worst shortage of homes for its poorest renters — 24 affordable homes per 100 households — while data centers race toward a third of the state's electricity, drinking-water needs are priced at $24 billion, and one in seven people face food insecurity.
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 figure on this page is printed with its instrument, edition and year, and disagreements between sources are shown rather than blended into averages. The recurring cases: ASCE's water-needs figures moved sharply between its 2024 and 2026 Oregon fact sheets ($10.1B to $24B drinking water; about $3.9B to $22.4B wastewater) — both editions appear, dated. TRIP and ASCE differ by $5 on the per-driver cost of bad roads ($319 vs $324) — both are printed. Chartis publishes no Oregon-specific rural-hospital count for 2026 in the material reviewed, and its older 0%-vulnerable Oregon figure conflicts with CHQPR's hospital-by-hospital analysis — CHQPR governs, and the conflict is stated in the hospitals defnote rather than smoothed over.
Geography is labelled on every measure because Oregon's instruments are not all statewide: TTI congestion figures describe the Portland, OR–WA metro only (including Vancouver, Washington); Oregon Food Bank visit counts cover its Oregon-and-southwest-Washington network; NLIHC, ASCE, TRIP, CHQPR and BEAD figures are Oregon statewide. Nothing metro-level is presented as a state figure.
Two honest gaps. Berkeley Lab's interconnection-queue series publishes by region, not by state, so this page prints no Oregon queue total rather than estimating one — the power category rests on the Oregon Department of Energy's commissioned load study instead. And the USDA food-access (LILA) measure is a 2015 vintage, the most recent state compilation published in the material reviewed; it is printed with its year and flagged in its defnote, alongside the current Map the Meal Gap and Food Bank figures.