The other ledger for a state that grows far more food than it eats: 115,000+ food-insecure neighbours, one in six bridges rated poor, a largest dam newly placed in the Corps' highest risk class, 89 high-hazard dams, and a $1.6B combined drinking-water and wastewater need — each figure sourced, each definition printed next to it.
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.
All nine categories are published for South Dakota. The state is small — about 900,000 people — and several of its numbers are genuinely the best in the nation (the shallowest low-income housing shortage, the best affordable-homes ratio), which this page prints alongside the burdens that persist inside those averages, rather than letting a favourable ranking close the subject.
Two categories here rest on a single named model each and are labelled as such: traffic (TTI's two-metro table — no statewide congestion figure exists) and power (the utilities' own July 2026 PUC resource-plan filings, plus one announced data-centre load; no official statewide load forecast is published). Hospitals prints two competing screens separately — 5 rural hospitals at risk under CHQPR's federal-criteria screen, 42% vulnerable under Chartis's financial screen — because for South Dakota they point in opposite directions and blending them would manufacture a number neither source published.
One honest gap, stated rather than filled: no verifiable statewide USDA Atlas count of South Dakota residents in low-income, low-access census tracts was published in the sources reviewed, so the food category carries Feeding America's food-insecurity measures only, and says so in its definition note. Dam counts print ASCE's published 89 high-hazard dams with a disclosed one-dam variance against a secondary inventory count; no condition share has been multiplied into a count anywhere on this page.