Data visualization final project
Burning Value: which Los Angeles ZIP codes are still worth the wildfire risk?
We joined CAL FIRE hazard zones to Zillow home values and Census income at the ZIP-code level, then built an interactive explorer that lets a homebuyer, investor, or planner weigh fire exposure against market performance in one place.
273
LA County ZIP codes analyzed
r = 0.27
Income vs. wildfire exposure - positive, not negative
94%
Of Topanga's land sits in a high fire-hazard zone
230
Historical fires ≥3,000 acres mapped
The question
Wildfire risk isn't priced the way you'd expect
The intuition going in was simple: wealthier neighborhoods should be safer. Wildfire risk, like most environmental burdens, is usually assumed to fall hardest on lower-income communities.
In Los Angeles County that intuition is wrong. Income and wildfire exposure are positively correlated, because the most desirable land here - the coastal bluffs and canyon hillsides of Malibu, Topanga, and Calabasas - is also the most combustible. The premium buyers pay for a view is a premium paid to live inside a fire hazard zone.
That reframed the project. Instead of an equity story, it became a market question: if risk and value move together, how should someone actually choose where to buy?
Hypothesis 1
Do higher-income ZIP codes face lower wildfire exposure? Tested with correlation, quartile boxplots, and a value-encoded scatterplot.
See the analysis →Hypothesis 3
Does a catastrophic fire permanently depress home values? We tracked Butte County for five years after the 2018 Camp Fire.
See the recovery curve →The Explorer
Six toggleable layers, clickable ZIP polygons, historical fire bubbles, and eight ranked top picks on one map.
Explore the map →The team
Amin Sharifi · Kala Fejzo · Moreki Khobotlo - Group 5. The full analysis lives in a reproducible Jupyter notebook; the dashboard on this site is rebuilt in the browser from the same pipeline.