United State Geodesic Survey

The 1994 Northridge Earthquake exacted a heavy toll on the soft stories of these buildings and then residents.

The city of Alameda hosted a workshop at the Alameda Free Library on Jan. 15, to discuss the proposed soft-story retrofit ordinance that will come before the city council at its Feb. 17 meeting. The city invited property owners whose buildings the ordinance might affect to the meeting. The property owners and members of the real estate community took issue with the city forcing them to retrofit their buildings. The meeting offered insight on the fight brewing between the city and those whose pocketbooks the ordinance would affect.

A soft story is any ground floor with large openings and slender columns that support the upper floors. Soft stories appear in residential structures as parking garages sometimes covered with a brick or wooden veneer. They also appear in commercial buildings as openings for retail space on the building's first floor.

City building official Greg McFann hosted the meeting, which he opened by showing the audience the damage that the 1989 Loma Prieta and 1994 Northridge earthquakes inflicted on soft-story residential structures.

The new ordinance would amend the Alameda Municipal Code by defining earthquake retrofit standards and requirements for soft-story residential buildings. McFann told the audience that if the city council passes the ordinance, city staff would then identify, catalog and list potentially hazardous soft-story residential buildings in Alameda, a process that could take anywhere from nine to 12 months. One of the engineers at the meeting explained to the audience that the new ordinance would not cover retail space because no one lives in those spaces. The city would notify owners of the properties on its list and give them time to retrofit the structures.

McFann pointed out that the ordinance would not require property owners to completely retrofit their soft-story properties. "This would only affect the first floor to prevent what happened in the Marina District" during the Loma Prieta earthquake, he said, when many San Francisco buildings with soft stories collapsed.

On May 1, 2007, the city of Fremont, which straddles the Hayward Fault, became the first Bay Area city to adopt an ordinance mandating the retrofit of soft-story buildings.

"The soft-story apartment earthquake retrofit ordinance is a voluntary ordinance developed to address earthquake hazards of apartments with tuck-under parking that were not specifically designed to consider the effect of reduced stiffness of the building at the ground level due to parking garage opening," the city of Fremont says on its Web site.

The Berkeley City Council has also adopted an ordinance that requires the identification of soft-story buildings, notification of property owners and tenants as well as an analysis of these structures.

Berkeley's soft-story ordinance requires owners of these structures to "retain an engineer to prepare a report identifying seismic weaknesses that follows that city's soft-story engineering evaluation report." In addition, the owners are required to file a plan to fix identified seismic weaknesses. The city charges a $585 fee to review the plans.

McFann told the audience that an engineering report could cost anywhere from $5,000 to $18,000, and the retrofit itself might cost from $6,000 to 20,000 per unit. Some in the audience disputed this, saying that the retrofit process could cost considerably less. "The city is proposing the Cadillac way, when there is a Chevrolet method," one property owner said. Property owners took issue with the city's notifying them that their structures fell into the must-be-fixed category. "Once the city identifies the building as potentially hazardous, there is a huge liability," another property owner told the audience. "We could lose our insurance coverage."

Most property owners at the meeting agreed that financing would be what one owner called "a huge issue," saying that getting loans to pay for a costly retrofit would not be easy in today's economy.

Benefits of Retrofitting

Just 800 of the 20,000 soft-story structures in Los Angeles have been retrofitted, according to the Los Angeles Times. In a story in the Realty Times, writer Broderick Perkins cites examples that point to the benefits of retrofitting a home without a soft story. According to Perkins, Santa Cruz architect Michael O'Hern owned two nearly identical Victorian-era homes on the same street.

"He retrofitted one, but not the other before the Loma Prieta earthquake hit. After the quake, damage to the upgraded home cost $5,000; the other cost $260,000 to repair."

Perkins also cited a Northridge neighborhood where one family spent $3,200 in 1993 to seismically upgrade the home built in 1911, but neighbors did nothing. "When the 1994 Northridge quake hit, the home was the only one undamaged on both sides of a two-block stretch," Perkins writes.

The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) estimates that as many as 160,000 Bay Area homes (single-family, condos and apartments) will be uninhabitable after the next major earthquake unless steps are taken to protect them. That number includes about 7,600 structures in Alameda. And in that number are at least 3,500 units in more than 200 soft-story Alameda residential buildings.