Growing Cities With Low Physical-Risk Exposure
Growth and hazard exposure are close to independent across large cities, so many of them manage both. These are the ones with the strongest showing on the two together.
89 of the 351 cities above 100,000 residents clear 55 on both the AreaProfile Growth and Physical Resilience signals — about 25% of them. The twenty below are the strongest on the two combined. Building where hazard exposure is low is not rare, but much of the recent US boom has gone to places with meaningful hurricane, wildfire or severe-weather exposure, and these are the exceptions at the top of the range.
Key findings
- Growth and Physical Resilience are nearly independent across all 351 eligible cities — a correlation of 0.14 — so the 89 that clear both bars are not evidence the two trade off against each other; a city can be built out quickly with low or high hazard exposure about equally often.
- TX accounts for 19 of the 89 qualifying cities — 21% of the list from one state — which tracks FEMA's loss-rate geography (no hurricane coast, no wildfire interface, no fault line across most of the state's interior) more than anything a city itself did.
- 7 of the 89 qualifying cities carry a hurricane, wildfire or earthquake as their single largest hazard; the rest top out on weather that is disruptive but rarely catastrophic — tornado, hail, heat and winter storms chief among them. A low Physical Resilience loss rate does not mean low weather exposure, only low exposure to the hazard types that destroy the most value per event.
- The list is not a cliff at 55: 115 cities qualify at a 50/50 threshold and 57 still qualify at 60/60, so the count above moves gradually with the bar rather than turning on where exactly it is drawn.
| City | Growth | Resilience | Permits per 1,000 | Largest hazard | Area Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Madison, WI | 70 | 97 | 11.2 | Cold wave | 73 |
| College Station, TX | 88 | 79 | 15.1 | Lightning | 69 |
| Syracuse, NY | 75 | 89 | 8.8 | Strong wind | 59 |
| Quincy, MA | 70 | 92 | 2.8 | Inland flooding | 69 |
| Olathe, KS | 75 | 83 | 7.5 | Winter weather | 75 |
| Pittsburgh, PA | 77 | 81 | 8.0 | Inland flooding | 69 |
| Waco, TX | 67 | 91 | 7.5 | Tornado | 63 |
| Meridian, ID | 76 | 82 | 11.3 | Winter weather | 75 |
| Sandy Springs, GA | 71 | 85 | 11.2 | Lightning | 77 |
| Columbia, SC | 90 | 66 | 22.9 | Ice storm | 65 |
| Green Bay, WI | 61 | 95 | 4.1 | Cold wave | 68 |
| Sioux Falls, SD | 73 | 83 | 10.7 | Ice storm | 68 |
| Arlington, VA | 72 | 84 | 12.1 | Heat wave | 73 |
| Worcester, MA | 70 | 85 | 3.5 | Ice storm | 62 |
| South Bend, IN | 60 | 95 | 3.4 | Cold wave | 62 |
| Ann Arbor, MI | 59 | 96 | 5.6 | Strong wind | 69 |
| Overland Park, KS | 72 | 83 | 5.1 | Winter weather | 74 |
| Carmel, IN | 78 | 76 | 10.0 | Tornado | 80 |
| Cincinnati, OH | 65 | 89 | 3.2 | Tornado | 64 |
| Grand Rapids, MI | 59 | 94 | 4.4 | Strong wind | 59 |
“Largest hazard” is the single hazard contributing most to the FEMA risk score for that city, even where its absolute level is low. The Physical Resilience signal is 70% FEMA’s modeled expected annual loss rate and 30% its community resilience percentile — both model outputs, not observed claims history, and both are aggregated to the city as a population-weighted mean of the counties it overlaps rather than measured at the city itself. The Growth signal measures recent permitting pace, not why a city is permitting: cheap land at the edge of a metro area produces the same reading as genuine in-migration demand, and this report does not distinguish the two. FEMA does not endorse this analysis; the hazard inputs are FEMA data and the signals and this selection are AreaProfile calculations.
Methodology
Cities of 100,000 or more where the AreaProfile Growth signal is above 55 and the Physical Resilience signal is also above 55, ranked by the sum of the two. Growth is built from Census permit data; resilience is derived from the FEMA National Risk Index, aggregated to the city from its component counties and inverted so that higher is more favorable.
Sources
- Federal Emergency Management Agency — National Risk Index (1.20.0)
- U.S. Census Bureau — Building Permits Survey (2026)
Related
Every figure here is recalculated from the same measurements the profiles use. See the methodology for how the underlying data is collected and normalized, and the editorial policy for how these reports are written.