Garden City, MI
How exposed is Garden City to wildfire?
Garden City's 17,378 buildings earn a 8th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Garden City's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 10th percentile nationally.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS classifies 98.9% of Garden City's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 1.1% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 17,378 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Garden City against the rest of the country
Within Michigan, Garden City ranks higher (23rd percentile) than it does nationally (8th) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Garden City ranks 29,095 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 818 by building count (1 is largest). Within Michigan alone, it ranks 576 of 745 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Michigan on its state page.
Garden City and the insurance market
Garden City's low rating (8th percentile nationally) sits outside the range where wildfire risk alone reshapes an insurance market — still, a homeowner here loses nothing by comparing rates.
What would actually reduce this score
Even with 98.9% of Garden City outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Garden City's 8th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Garden City, see the exposure-zones guide.