San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
State offers cash for single-family home quake redo
Homeowners in San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Pasadena and Los Angeles will soon be able to apply for grants to reinforce some single-family homes against earthquake damage.
The grants apply to twostory “soft-story” buildings — those with a weak first story that is prone to collapse in an earthquake. In single-family homes, this could look like living spaces built above a garage that isn’t adequately reinforced, for example. Homes built before 2000 may have this vulnerability, said program manager Janiele Maffei, chief mitigation officer for the California Earthquake Authority, a state-created earthquake insurance provider.
The new state program is supported by federal funding and will provide an estimated 375 total grants of up to $13,000 each, according to a news release from state agencies that oversee the program. The typical soft-story retrofit can cost between $14,000 to $27,000, Maffei said.
San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland all have ordinances that require retrofits of multifamily soft-story buildings with five or more residential units. But there are no requirements in most California cities to retrofit single-family softstory buildings with four or less units — a gap that the new $5 million state program is working to address, Maffei said.
“If you were to open up Google Maps and do a walk around San Francisco, that single-family softstory
house is prolific. It is just found everywhere,” Maffei said.
San Francisco doesn’t have an estimate of the number of single-family soft-story homes, according to chief resilience officer Brian Strong. “But these second-story-overgarage buildings are noticeably common in many neighborhoods across the city, including the Sunset and the Bayview,” Strong wrote in an email to the Chronicle.
In Berkeley, there are approximately 200 to 300 soft-story buildings with three to four residential units that are not required to be retrofitted per the city’s current ordinance, according to Jenny McNulty, the city’s resilient buildings program manager. Berkeley doesn’t have an estimate of the total number of single-family softstory buildings, McNulty said.
The city of Oakland did not respond to requests for comment.
Soft-story buildings are known to be dangerous in a major earthquake. In the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, soft-story failure was responsible for nearly
half of all the housing units that became uninhabitable, according to a supporting document for the City of Alameda’s soft-story ordinance.
San Francisco enacted a mandatory ordinance requiring retrofits for multifamily soft-story buildings with at least five units and three stories in 2013. Currently, 90 percent of the 4,939 buildings part of the ordinance have been retrofitted, Strong wrote.
In Berkeley, 275 of the city’s 303 multifamily softstory buildings have been retrofitted, McNulty said.
Multifamily soft-story buildings host much of Berkeley’s and San Francisco’s affordable housing, both McNulty and Strong said. Berkeley’s ordinance only requires retrofits on soft-story buildings with five or more units in order to focus city resources on where they will have the greatest impact, McNulty said.
“Single-family homes tend to be owner-occupied, and people have a stronger motivation to retrofit the building that they live in with their family than to retrofit a building that they may own as rental property,” McNulty said.
But both multifamily and single-family soft-story buildings collapsed in the Marina neighborhood during Loma Prieta, according to Maffei of the California Earthquake Authority. “And when you use the word collapse, you immediately are acknowledging that that kind of damage can cause injury or death,” Maffei added.
The $5 million Earthquake Soft Story program is the second retrofit program rolled out by the CEA in conjunction with the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.
Even as the new singlefamily soft-story retrofit program is released, some are advocating for putting more state resources toward upgrading vulnerable buildings.
Last year $250 million was allocated in the state budget for the first time to help Californians retrofit multifamily soft-story homes, said Assembly member Freddie Rodriguez, D-Ponoma, who chairs the assembly committee on emergency management. The funding was cut from the 2023-24 state budget proposal when the state faced a shortfall.
The funding was initially approved when the state was in a period of budgetary surplus, said H.D. Palmer, deputy director of external affairs for the California Department of Finance.
It has been placed in “trigger,” which means the funding would be restored in the 2024-25 budget proposal if there are sufficient funds, Palmer wrote in an email to the Chronicle.
Rodriguez has introduced bill AB1505 to reinstate the funding in the 2023-24 budget. He said the funding would be a small investment to protect California.
“I’m hoping that I don’t have to wait another year. Waiting is just going to cause more issues, because we don’t know when that earthquake is going to come,” Rodriguez said.