Highland Park, IL
Highland Park wildfire risk explained
Highland Park's 11,504 buildings earn a 24th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Highland Park at the 26th percentile, close to its 24th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS classifies 88.1% of Highland Park's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 12% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 11,504 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where Highland Park ranks
Within Illinois, Highland Park ranks higher (68th percentile) than it does nationally (24th) — one of the more fire-exposed places in a state that, overall, scores lower than that. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Highland Park ranks 24,038 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 1,368 by building count (1 is largest). Within Illinois alone, it ranks 456 of 1,445 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Illinois on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
At the 24th national percentile, Highland Park rates moderate for wildfire risk — well short of the threshold where insurers have been withdrawing coverage, though comparing a quote costs nothing either way.
What would actually reduce this score
Highland Park's 88.1% Minimal-exposure share means structure-level hardening matters less here than it would elsewhere — still worth the low-cost basics, per the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 11,504 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Highland Park. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Highland Park, see the exposure-zones guide.