South Gate, CA
South Gate, CA's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
South Gate sits at the 39th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — close to the middle of USFS's national wildfire-risk range — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 25,894 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts South Gate at the 45th percentile, close to its 39th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS classifies 99.9% of South Gate's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 0.1% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one. At 25,894 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Where South Gate ranks
Inside California, South Gate sits at just the 6th percentile even though it scores 39th 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, South Gate ranks 19,089 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 482 by building count (1 is largest). Within California alone, it ranks 1,481 of 1,570 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for California on its state page.
South Gate and the insurance market
South Gate's 39th-percentile score lands in California, the only two states requiring a wildfire disclosure at sale. California's surplus-lines homeowners market passed 300,000 policies for the first time in 2025, driven by carriers pulling back from wildfire-exposed areas statewide. The disclosure-law guide covers what it requires.
What would actually reduce this score
Even with 99.9% of South Gate 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
Every one of the two percentiles behind South Gate's 19,089-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond South Gate, see the exposure-zones guide.