The other ledger for Wisconsin: hunger that nearly doubled after the pandemic to more than 804,000 people, a 117,934-home deficit for the poorest renters, twelve rural hospitals at risk after decades of stability, and a power grid told to grow 40% in six years because three data centres are arriving at once. 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. Wisconsin's needs are a study in contrasts: a housing deficit of 117,934 homes for its poorest renters and a food-insecurity rate that nearly doubled after the pandemic, set against dam and hospital fleets whose inspected condition and closure history have historically been among the nation's better ones — and a power system that must now grow 40% in six years after two flat decades.
Where sources disagree, both are printed and neither is averaged away. Two rural-hospital screens give different answers for Wisconsin — CHQPR's financial screen flags 12 hospitals at risk (5 at immediate risk), while Chartis's 2025 vulnerability model places Wisconsin in its lowest band, with only 1–9% of rural hospitals vulnerable; the state's historically light closure count (one from 2005 into the early 2020s on the Sheps tracker) and the abrupt 2024 HSHS closures of two western Wisconsin hospitals are both on the record. The dams category is handled the same way: Wisconsin's high-hazard dams are in unusually good inspected condition (only 5 of 206 in poor or unsatisfactory condition), so the page prints the failure record and the growing hazard inventory rather than inventing a poor-condition crisis.
Metro, regional and utility figures are labeled as what they are: the traffic numbers are TTI's for the Milwaukee and Madison urban areas — no statewide congestion total exists, and none is printed — and the power numbers are the PSC of Wisconsin's own draft Strategic Energy Assessment compiling its utilities' forecasts, a planning document that assumes the three named data-centre developments are built at their projected scale. The food category runs on Feeding America's food-insecurity estimates; no verified statewide USDA low-access tract count was published in the sources reviewed, so no food-desert resident count is printed.