OAKLAND — In the aftermath of a powerful 4.4-magnitude earthquake that shook the area Jan. 4, city officials want mandatory seismic retrofitting of soft-story buildings, which are especially prone to quake damage.
A soft-story building is defined as a structure constructed before 1991 — when the California Building Code’s earthquake design standards were enhanced — with large openings on the ground floor like a parking garage or store-front windows and slim columns supporting the above stories, according to the city’s website.
Hundreds of soft-story buildings were damaged or destroyed in the Loma Prieta earthquake that hit the Bay Area in 1989 as well as the 1994 Northridge quake in Southern California.
In an effort to protect the more than 1,500 soft-story buildings in Oakland from the inevitable “big one,” Councilman Dan Kalb plans to introduce an ordinance for the council to vote on within the next few months that would require soft-story building with five units or more to undergo seismic retrofitting.
“It’s essentially to save lives,” Kalb told the Oakland Tribune.
San Francisco passed a similar ordinance that went into effect in 2017; Berkeley and Fremont also require soft-story buildings be seismically retrofitted.
The epicenter for the magnitude 4.4 earthquake that shook the East Bay on Jan. 4 was below the Claremont Hotel in the Oakland hills. Though the temblor did no damage, it was felt more than 150 miles away.
Some of Oakland’s soft-story buildings are commercial or mixed-use, but many of them house multiple families, Kalb said. If a major earthquake occurs and the buildings are not retrofitted, Kalb said, those families could be left without a place to live.
“I think it’s absolutely essential that we talk about housing all of the time because we need more of it … but we also have to protect the housing that we already have,” Kalb said.
The responsibility of getting the buildings retrofitted will fall on property owners, Kalb said; depending on the size of the building, the retrofitting could be costly. Under the planned ordinance, property owners will be able to pass along some of the cost to renters by raising the rent.
Some low-interest loans are available for property owners to retrofit buildings through state programs.
“If you’re retrofitting a building, the benefit will be good for 30, 40 years,” Kalb said. “We want to prolong it like 25 years, and say that tenants should not have to pay for more than half of that. If the cost is split between tenants and property owners equally and spread over 25 years, that way any rent increase that could occur is very minimal.”
The city’s Planning and Building Department will be in charge of enforcing the ordinance, Kalb said; the department has compiled a list of soft-story buildings in the city. The retrofitting will be done in phases, and could take several years.
“It’s going to be time intensive, but the need is just so crystal clear that we need to do this,” Kalb said.
