Growth is higher in US counties with moderate-to-high wildfire risk

From the blog post:

This push into the wildland-urban interface during the affordability challenges of the previous decade is reflected in the consistently higher population growth and share of new construction in cities with moderate-to-high wildfire risk (typical Risk Ratings over 45) compared to their parent regions as a whole. Conversely, population growth and development in very risky cities (typical Risk Ratings over 90) is generally much lower than in the full regions they’re a part of, though Southern Oregon and the Salt Lake CBSA are exceptions. But it’s optimistic to think that low growth in the riskiest of cities is due to the appropriate consideration of wildfire risk into the home buying and building decisions. What is more likely for most of these regions is that the distance of the riskiest cities from the job core mitigates the development pressure.

At the end of the article is a list of 28 counties that they calculated have the highest fire risk.

This is from a San Francisco startup that is selling data about risk from climate change. It looks like you can enter an address or zip code and see what the rating is. It’s free “for a limited time.” It looks like they are pretty new. The Twitter account was created in April.

For fire risk, it seems like their report isn’t very location-specific? It’s apparently based on what happened in a 100 mile radius.