Tree-lined street in Walnut Creek, ornamental cherry and valley oaks on Jones Road, by the Iron Horse Trail, Photo: Utilizer, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0Tools
What the federal record says about an address
Five public datasets, read at the coordinates of one property: the flood zone FEMA has drawn, the seismic demand the building code assumes, the wildfire hazard the Forest Service maps, the EPA sites nearby, and what HUD considers a fair rent. No score, no ranking, no interpretation, just the record, with its sources.
What these numbers are, and what they are not
Everything above is published by a federal agency and reproduced here without adjustment. That makes it authoritative about what the agency has mapped. It does not make it a finding about a building.
A flood zone is drawn at map scale, not surveyed at your lot line. FEMA maps communities; the boundary between zones can run through a parcel, and only an elevation certificate establishes where a specific structure sits relative to the base flood elevation. Lenders and insurers rely on the certificate, not on this page.
The seismic figures are code design values at a default site class.They describe the shaking a new building at this location must be designed to withstand. They are not a site-specific geotechnical study, they say nothing about soil liquefaction or an existing structure’s condition, and every address in this region carries a high category, that is normal here, not a warning.
Wildfire hazard potential is a 270-metre raster. One cell covers roughly sixteen acres, so it characterises a landscape rather than a garden. Where it reports non-burnable land cover, that means the mapped cell is developed or bare ground, it does not mean the surrounding hillsides carry no risk.
EPA proximity is not contamination. The listing shows tracked sites near a point, ordered by distance. Whether anything ever migrated from one of them to this property is a question for an environmental assessment.
HUD fair market rents are a subsidy standard.They are set near the 40th percentile of rents across a whole county or ZIP area, for the housing-voucher programme. Treating one as this property’s market rent would be a mistake in both directions.
Sources: FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer; USGS seismic design values (ASCE 7-22); USFS Wildfire Hazard Potential; EPA Facility Registry Service; HUD Fair Market Rents; geocoding and the basemap from the US Census Bureau and USGS. None of these agencies endorses, sponsors or verifies this site. This page is not a substitute for the statutory disclosures a seller owes a buyer, for a home inspection, for a natural hazard disclosure report, or for a title report, and nothing on it is legal, tax or insurance advice.
Next step
Data describes a place. It does not describe a house.
Every one of these datasets stops at the property line. What the roof is doing, what the neighbours are like at 7am, what the last three comparable sales actually closed at, that is the part you walk through with someone who works here.