Homewood, SC
Homewood wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Homewood at the 74th national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 822 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Homewood at the 72nd percentile, close to its 74th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS classifies 66.7% of Homewood's buildings as Direct exposure, higher than its 33.3% Indirect share and far above its 0% Minimal share — a profile where 548 structures sit close enough to vegetation that lot clearing matters most.
How Homewood compares
There's little gap between Homewood's 74th national percentile and its 70th percentile inside South Carolina, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Homewood ranks 8,232 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 13,429 by building count (1 is largest). Within South Carolina alone, it ranks 139 of 474 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for South Carolina on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Homewood
Homewood's 74th-percentile, high rating is the kind of score behind a broader national pattern: insurers pulling back from the highest wildfire-risk markets, non-renewing or declining new policies outright, most visibly in California. Shopping around, not assuming automatic renewal, tends to matter here.
What would actually reduce this score
Homewood's 66.7% 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
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 822 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Homewood. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Homewood, see the exposure-zones guide.