Dogtown, CA
Dogtown wildfire risk explained
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Dogtown at the 75th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 2,182 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Dogtown at the 77th national percentile — 2 points above its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
Of Dogtown's 2,182 counted buildings, 93.7% carry Direct exposure and only 5% carry Minimal — a lopsided split that puts defensible-space clearing ahead of vents or roofing as the intervention worth doing first.
How Dogtown compares
Inside California, Dogtown sits at just the 33rd percentile even though it scores 75th nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Dogtown ranks 7,869 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 6,984 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,053 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
Dogtown and the insurance market
Dogtown sits in California, one of two states that legally require a wildfire-risk disclosure at sale. California's FAIR Plan, the state's insurer of last resort, ended 2025 with 668,609 residential policies after adding 21,859 in Q4 alone — the kind of market shift a 75th-percentile score like Dogtown's can end up mattering for. More on the disclosure law.
What would actually reduce this score
Dogtown's 93.7% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Dogtown's 7,869-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Dogtown, see the exposure-zones guide.