The Bay Area is already facing a housing crisis: Housing is unaffordable for low- and middle-income residents, housing development is not keeping up with demand, and in 2022 more than 30,000 people were unhoused. If a major earthquake were to hit, the region could face significant casualties and lose thousands of housing units. The lives of residents will be enormously disrupted, and it could take months to rebuild damaged housing and re-establish essential services. California’s housing crisis makes it difficult to advance policy and action on earthquake resilience due to cost trade-offs and misaligned goals. Local, regional, and state partners must come together to navigate the interconnected challenges of hazard resilience and housing access.
SPUR, the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California, and the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute recently hosted an event for local and state government agencies, engineering firms, and nonprofit leaders to learn about the seismic vulnerabilities of the region’s housing stock and how these vulnerabilities can be reduced.
How many people might be displaced by a major earthquake in the Bay Area?
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, 152,000 households, or 411,000 people, could be temporarily or permanently displaced from their homes after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake on the Hayward Fault. Existing efforts to improve housing accessibility and advance community resilience could be undone by a major earthquake if a significant percentage of the Bay Area’s housing units are damaged, resulting in resident displacement from the region. Prioritizing earthquake resilience is an investment in the long-term stability of the region and its communities, especially low-income communities of color that are likely to be most impacted by a disaster.
Many older housing types have known seismic deficiencies such as unreinforced masonry and non-ductile concrete that may cause them to be uninhabitable or even collapse in a major earthquake. Retrofitting existing housing could protect people from injury or death as a result of a major earthquake. Doing so would reduce the number of people temporarily or permanently displaced from their homes.
What level of recovery do existing building codes provide?
Newer homes and apartment buildings will fare better than older ones but may still not be functional for weeks or months after an earthquake due to repairs. Today’s building code aims for “life safety” performance, meaning building occupants can exit safely, but the structure may not be usable right away. Through the state’s Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA), the Bay Area has been directed to construct more than 400,000 new housing units in the next 10 years. Building this new housing to a higher seismic or “functional recovery” standard could minimize displacement and speed up post-earthquake recovery.
Projects built to functional recovery standards — one example is San Francisco’s Casa Adelante — show that benefits can be achieved with only a 0%–3% increase in development costs. Functional recovery is a post-disaster performance standard in which a building or lifeline infrastructure system is maintained or restored to its intended function within an acceptable time period, defined by the building’s use and by community needs. For example, the acceptable recovery time for a hospital might be days, while an office building’s acceptable recovery time could be months, depending on need.
What challenges do affordable housing providers face in retrofitting affordable housing units?
Affordable housing providers already operate on tight budgets and do not have internal funds for seismic upgrades. They often must squeeze structural supports into small units without jeopardizing the units’ livability. Due to the lack of state and federal funding allocated to retrofitting, affordable housing providers typically must finance seismic retrofits as part of a rehabilitation funded by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program.
Navigating complex permitting and funding processes and compliance with stringent building codes and historic standards can further limit retrofitting. The Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC) operates 48 buildings with affordable housing units in San Francisco. In 2021, TNDC renovated and seismically retrofitted The Ambassador Hotel, a historic landmark building in the Tenderloin. The building provides 134 single-room-occupancy units that serve formerly unhoused and low-income residents. A seismic retrofit of the Ambassador was necessary not only to meet TNDC’s life-safety requirements and protect vulnerable residents in the building but also to satisfy the tax credit investor involved in the rehabilitation. Funding the seismic retrofit at The Ambassador was a challenge due to lack of state funding for affordable housing, fierce competition for the scarce funds that are available, and tight funding timelines for the low-income housing tax credit and tax-exempt bonds. A collaborative effort by policymakers, state agencies, financial institutions, and affordable housing developers will be needed to create viable solutions that prioritize both safety and affordability.
What can policymakers do to promote the building of new housing to higher seismic standards?
Event attendees suggested two pathways for policymakers to advance the adoption of higher seismic standards for new housing developments to manage earthquake risks.
1. Policymakers can incentivize housing developers and affordable housing providers to invest in earthquake resilience.
Housing developers and managers operate on tight financial margins, but building to high seismic standards upfront could save on repair or replacement costs after an earthquake. Incentives for developers could include code exemptions, density bonuses, tax credits, reduced property taxes and insurance premiums, and permit streamlining. Incentives for affordable housing providers could include all of the above in addition to increased state funding for affordable housing and removal of certain limitations on what state funding sources such as the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit can be used for.
2. Policymakers can draft post-disaster policies that prioritize “building back better.”
After a major earthquake, when the vulnerabilities of our housing stock are on display and the displacement effects are acutely felt, the market will more highly value earthquake-resilient housing. If policymakers put in the work now to draft post-disaster policies that include guidelines for rebuilding housing to functional recovery standards, in the event of a major earthquake they will have new, more stringent policies ready to go and will be able to react quickly to redevelopment needs while prioritizing earthquake resilience. This will poise the region to “build back better” — meaning any new housing built after the quake will be less vulnerable to seismic damage in the future.
SPUR is working with our partners to develop additional recommendations and to build a multidisciplinary coalition to advance policies as well as state and federal funding opportunities to make our region’s housing stock and communities more resilient to earthquakes.
To learn more or get involved in this effort, email [email protected]
Thank you to our event co-organizers: Wayne Low, Keith Palmer, and Megan Stringer from SEAONC; Anna Lang & Justin Moresco from EERI
Thank you to the panel speakers: Laurie Johnson, principal at Laurie Johnson Consulting; Mary Comerio, professor emerita of the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design; Emily Van Loon, associate director of Housing Development at Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation; Jared DeBock, senior associate of Haselton Baker Risk Group and associate professor of Civil Engineering at CSU Chico; and Michael Lane, director of State Policy at SPUR
Thank you to the breakout facilitators: Group 1 Existing Housing Stock: Daniel Zepeda, senior principal of Degenkolb, and Emily Van Loon, associate director of Housing Development at Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation; Group 2 New Housing Development: Laura Goldstein, director of the Department of Project Management at Stanford University, and Kevin Moore, senior principal at Simpson Gumpertz & Heger