California’s Multifamily Seismic Retrofit Program received $15 million in the 2023–24 state budget to subsidize retrofits of seismically vulnerable older apartment buildings across the state. This program will principally provide financial assistance in the form of grants to multifamily property owners who own wood-frame buildings with a “soft-story” structural deficiency –– typical of buildings built before 1978 that have large openings in ground-story walls for parking stalls, garage doors, or storefront windows. The program is intended to support low- to moderate-income renters as well as communities with high earthquake risk and high social vulnerability. How the state will target these renters remains unclear.
Although a far cry from the program’s original allocation of $250 million for use over 10 years, the $15 million the program ultimately received owes to a coalition’s efforts to advance the seismic resilience of California’s existing housing stock.
SPUR, along with the U.S. Resiliency Council, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, and the Structural Engineers Association of California, fought for program funding by writing support letters and gathering signatures from local governments, property owner associations, structural engineers, and others. Coalition representatives testified at an Emergency Management Committee hearing in May and coordinated with the committee’s chairperson, Assemblymember Freddie Rodriguez (D-Pomona), to preserve some funding in the state budget this year. We commend the work of Assemblymember Rodriguez, and we call on the state to be prepared to dedicate more funds in the coming years to maintain the Multifamily Seismic Retrofit Program.
Retrofitting Buildings Is an Investment in Communities
The San Francisco Bay Area has a 72% chance of experiencing a magnitude 6.7 or greater earthquake in the next 30 years. In a major earthquake, many homes may become uninhabitable. Communities fracture as people search for temporary shelter or are forced to relocate. In the event of a major earthquake, the retrofits catalyzed by the Multifamily Seismic Retrofit Program will contribute to disaster recovery by
- Protecting residents from physical harm
- Allowing residents to return home more quickly than they otherwise would
- Reducing residential displacement and neighborhoods’ need to rebuild
- Preserving existing housing in the midst of a long-term housing and homelessness crisis
- Decreasing the climate impact of an earthquake by avoiding building collapse, which minimizes debris waste and the need for carbon-intensive new construction
By reducing building damage and keeping people in their homes, retrofitting can help maintain social networks during emergencies. These non-government support networks, provided by neighbors and community groups, are often critical to disaster response –– just look at the mutual aid networks that popped up during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Soft-Story Retrofit Ordinances Are Lacking in California
In the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and the 1994 Northridge earthquake, California experienced firsthand the collapse of soft-story wood-frame buildings. In the Northridge earthquake, some 200 soft-story buildings collapsed, including one in which 16 people died. Yet few cities in California have gathered building inventory data to determine their soft-story building risk, and even fewer have adopted a mandatory soft-story retrofit ordinance. San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Fremont, and Los Angeles are among the exceptions. In the Bay Area, Mill Valley recently adopted a mandatory retrofit ordinance, Albany is not far behind, and San José’s ordinance is still under development. At present, most mandatory retrofit ordinances target wood-frame buildings that have two or more stories and three or more units and that were permitted for construction before 1978. Because of the age of these buildings, units in them are often relatively affordable to rent or buy. Therefore, if these buildings collapse in an earthquake, lower-income residents could be at greatest risk of injury and displacement.
Mandatory Soft-Story Retrofit Ordinances in California
Most mandatory retrofit ordinances target wood-frame buildings that have two or more stories and three or more units and that were permitted for construction before 1978.
| San Francisco | Berkeley | Los Angeles | Oakland | |
| Year Adopted | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2019 |
| Building Characteristics | 3 or more stories, 5 or more units, constructed before 1978 | 2 or more stories, 5 or more units, constructed before 1978 | 2 or more stories, 3 or more units, constructed before 1978 | 2 or more stories, 5 or more units, designed or built prior to 1991 |
| Approximate Number of Buildings Subject to Mandate | 4,900 | 300 | 12,500 | 1,480 |
Sources: (1) San Francisco data –– Map of Soft Story Properties; 2) Berkeley –– Communication with City of Berkeley; (3) Los Angeles –– Soft Story Compliance Report; (4) Oakland –– ABAG Soft-story Housing Improvement Plan for the City of Oakland, 2014
Without a state financing program, adoption of mandatory retrofit ordinances has been slow. Cities struggle to dedicate resources to low-probability, high-risk hazards in the midst of more immediate and overlapping crises, including homelessness, housing affordability, and climate change. With the new state-funded Multifamily Seismic Retrofit Program, local jurisdictions could be offered some financial and technical assistance to develop retrofit programs.
The Path to the Multifamily Seismic Retrofit Program
In 2022, Assembly Bill 1721 proposed an allocation of $400 million per year for five years to provide matching grant funding for earthquake retrofits, establishing the Multifamily Seismic Retrofit Program. Soon after, the amount was reduced to $250 million for one year (covering 10 years of program implementation) and the program was placed in a budget trailer bill, Senate Bill 189, which was approved and signed into law by Governor Newsom in June 2022. Despite bipartisan support for the program, the program received no funding in the governor’s proposed 2023–24 budget. Assemblymember Rodriguez immediately put forth an emergency funding bill, AB 1505, to appropriate $250 million for the program. After further negotiations, the funding package for the Multifamily Seismic Retrofit Program was reduced to $15 million for fiscal year 2023–24.
The Multifamily Seismic Retrofit Program is the state’s first program with the goal of protecting vulnerable renters in the event of a major earthquake. The program seeks to target 2–unit to 20-unit multifamily residential buildings in communities with high social vulnerability.
The California Residential Mitigation Program (CRMP), a joint-powers-authority of the California Earthquake Authority and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, will direct development and implementation of this program. The CRMP was established, by state mandate, in 2012 to help homeowners to strengthen their houses. Prior to creation of the Multifamily Seismic Retrofit Program, the state offered retrofit assistance only to qualified homeowners. It did so through the CRMP’s Earthquake Brace & Bolt Program, which targets single-family homes with “cripple walls,” or short wood stud walls around a house’s crawl space, and through the $5 million pilot Earthquake Soft-Story Program, which targets single-family homes and duplexes with a living space over a garage.
The CRMP has yet to determine the criteria for grants offered through the Multifamily Seismic Retrofit Program. We do not yet know how many at-risk buildings will be retrofitted with the program’s initial funding of $15 million. For reference, a recent SPUR review of soft-story retrofit cost data from the City and County of San Francisco’s mandatory retrofit program and the City of Berkeley’s retrofit program revealed that the average cost of a seismic retrofit is $104,000 for soft-story buildings with 5–14 units and $152,000 for buildings with 15–20 units. (SPUR will release more detailed soft-story retrofit cost data later this year.) This is far more expensive than a typical single-family home Brace & Bolt retrofit which, according to the CRMP, cost between $3,000 to $7,000.
Design and Construction Costs for Soft-Story Seismic Retrofits
The average cost of a seismic retrofit is $104,000 for soft-story buildings with 5–14 units and $152,000 for buildings with 15–20 units.
| Berkeley Retrofit Program Data | San Francisco Program Data | |
| Average cost of retrofit for buildings with 5–14 units | $97,000* | $107,000** |
| Cost per unit | $14,000* | $14,000** |
| Sample size | 27 | 2,991 |
| Average cost of retrofit for buildings with 15–20 units | $145,000** | $158,500** |
| Cost per unit | $8,400** | $9,300** |
| Sample size | 27 | 321 |
Sources: Program data from the City of Berkeley (via personal communication) and the City and County of San Francisco.
Notes: * Inflation-adjusted actual costs, the City of Berkeley FEMA grant data; ** Inflation-adjusted permit costs increased by 25% to reflect actual costs.
The CRMP will need to be strategic in developing program criteria in order to retrofit as many buildings and protect as many renters as possible while also incentivizing property owners to retrofit dwellings and limiting capital cost rental increases for tenants who already struggle to make rent.
SPUR Supports Increasing Funding for Seismic Retrofits
Committing funds to mitigating seismic risks makes economic sense. According to the National Institute of Building Sciences, every $1 spent on building retrofits for earthquake safety produces $13 in post-disaster benefits. Given that 44% of California residents are renters, the CRMP’s past focus on providing retrofit grant assistance only to single-family homeowners is an oversight. The Multifamily Seismic Retrofit Program is an investment in post-disaster community resilience and equity.
Our coalition will continue to push for future funding for the Multifamily Seismic Retrofit Program and for the development of program criteria that target the state’s most vulnerable renters. If you would like to learn more or take part in efforts by SPUR and our coalition members to advocate for funding, contact Sarah Atkinson at [email protected].