North Gates, NY
North Gates wildfire risk explained
North Gates sits at the 7th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 3,459 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks North Gates at the 8th national percentile — 1 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
USFS classifies 80.1% of North Gates's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 19.9% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
How North Gates compares
There's little gap between North Gates's 7th national percentile and its 14th percentile inside New York, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, North Gates ranks 29,228 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 4,833 by building count (1 is largest). Within New York alone, it ranks 1,106 of 1,289 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for New York on its state page.
North Gates and the insurance market
North Gates's low wildfire rating (7th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
What would actually reduce this score
North Gates's 80.1% 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
North Gates's 7th-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 North Gates, see the exposure-zones guide.