Analysis
Findings
Two hypotheses drive the project. The first asks who actually bears wildfire risk in Los Angeles County. The second asks whether a catastrophic fire permanently damages a local housing market.
Hypothesis 1 - rejected
Higher-income ZIP codes do not face lower wildfire exposure
Across 273 LA County ZIP codes, median household income and wildfire exposure correlate at r = 0.267 - a weak but clearly positive relationship, the opposite of what we predicted. The highest-income ZIPs include some of the most exposed land in the county.
Income vs. wildfire exposure
Each dot is a ZIP code; larger and darker dots are higher home values.
Wildfire exposure across income quartiles
Most ZIP codes in every quartile have effectively no hazard-zone land. What separates the top quartile is its tail: the maximum exposure reaches 94%, roughly triple every other group.
| Income group | Median | 75th pct. | Max exposure |
|---|
The wealthiest quartile has both the widest spread and the highest ceiling. That's the hillside-and-coastline effect: Topanga (94% of its land in a high hazard zone), Stevenson Ranch (87%), and Malibu (60%) are all high-income, high-value, and highly exposed.
Hypothesis 3 - partly rejected
A catastrophic fire didn't permanently depress prices
The 2018 Camp Fire destroyed most of Paradise, California. If wildfire permanently damages a housing market, Butte County should have lagged the state ever since. Indexing both to 100 at the month of the fire shows something more complicated: Butte County outperformed the California average sharply in the first year - a supply shock, as displaced households competed for the housing that survived - then gave that advantage back over five years.
Indexed home value recovery (Nov 2018 = 100)
Relative performance vs. the California average
One year out Butte County was 11.2 points ahead of the state; five years out it was 2.5 points behind. The damage shows up as a slow erosion of relative performance, not a crash - which is exactly why a single post-fire snapshot would have told the wrong story.
What this means for the map
Together these results argue against treating wildfire risk as a simple discount factor. Exposure sits alongside high value, not opposite it, and markets absorb even catastrophic fires unevenly over years. That's the case for a layered, exploratory map rather than a single ranking: the honest answer depends on which trade-off a given user is willing to make.