The other ledger for South Carolina: 156 high-hazard dams already rated poor or unsatisfactory, a 92,446-home shortage at the bottom of the rental market, $15.5B of documented water-system needs, and roads that cost every driver $730 a year. And one honest blank: no statewide food-access figure exists, so this page prints the ground-truthed study it has and says so. 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.
Food deserts — the statewide figure is not published. No citable current statewide low-income/low-access population or share exists for South Carolina. Both food measures come from an eight-county, ground-truthed study (Liese et al. and a USDA ERS project) and are labeled with that geography everywhere they appear. A regional study was not dressed up as a state figure.
Traffic. INRIX publishes congestion by metro, not state. The Charleston 42-hour figure is flagged news-flagged in the data: it rests on secondary reporting of INRIX's 2025 Scorecard, whose public tables do not expose the Charleston row. The statewide companion measure (vehicle travel +36% since 2000, TRIP) is the harder figure.
Hospitals. The closure count (4 since 2005) is the Sheps Center's, via a 2021 publication of its data — the freshest SC-specific tally retrieved. Chartis publishes South Carolina's at-risk share only as a 31–40% band; the band is printed, never converted into an invented count.
Water. EPA publishes state needs totals in downloadable datasets rather than a citable state page, so the $8.1B / $7.4B figures arrive via the Water Program Portal's summary of the EPA surveys; the drinking-water figure is independently corroborated by ASCE's state fact sheet. The wastewater figure supersedes ASCE's older $5B line — both are named so the difference stays visible.
Power. No South Carolina interconnection-queue total is published (the state is not in PJM, and no Duke/Santee Cooper SC queue figure was found) — the category says 'Not published' for that measure rather than substituting a two-state Carolinas number.
Editions are named. Several lead sources are 2026 editions (ASCE's SC report card, TRIP's April 2026 Key Facts, NLIHC's 2026 Gap, Dominion's 2026 IRP, the June 2026 Canadys order) — all published before this page's Oct 25, 2026 verification date, and named on every measure so edition differences stay visible.