3,400 concrete buildings in San Francisco may face earthquake hazards

Some people doubt whether the local economy will be able to afford to make the buildings safe at a time when the city is already in dire financial straits.

“I don’t know how it’s going to play out, honestly,” said Janan Niu, executive director of the San Francisco Condo Association, a trade group for city realtors.

She said the city is not promising to help pay for the business, and the cost of private loans is going up.

“I think there is a general recognition that we need to do this,” she said, but added, “We are in a very dangerous economic climate right now where there is not a lot of funding available for this work.”

In 2017, apartment owners in West Hollywood, a city in Los Angeles County, were so aghast at the cost that they lobbied their city council to make the retrofits voluntary—a decision that relieved them of the cost but not the risk.

In San Francisco, it will be up to the mayor and the Board of Supervisors to decide whether mandatory retrofits are made, and if so, by what deadline. Engineers expect property owners to have contracts to comply.

The List of At-Risk Buildings includes many addresses associated with at-risk populations. The highest concentration of buildings is in one of San Francisco’s poorest neighborhoods, the Tenderloin, and no fewer than four buildings on the list are large multi-story apartment homes for low-income renters who may not have anywhere else to go.

Building retrofits can be so disruptive that tenants often won’t be able to stay in their homes or offices while it’s happening, said Megan Stringer, president of the Northern California Structural Engineers Association.

“You’re talking about people potentially needing displacement while the retrofits are happening, and that’s not something people want to hear,” Stringer said.

“It’s invasive and expensive, so you can imagine it would be a sensitive topic for building owners and occupants,” she said.

It has low-income tenants,” said Maria Zamudio, organizing director of the San Francisco Housing Rights Commission, which advises renters on their rights and city council advocates.

Zamudio said most renters have no idea about the risks involved with concrete or the chance that they might need to move during the update.

“Every day, tenants are still trying to recover from the impact of Covid on their lives and finances,” she said. “People are still really worried about their rent.”

Behind the scenes, advocates are pushing the city to improve its notification to tenants about their right of return after retrofitting. They also want to prevent landlords from passing on the cost of retrofits to tenants in rental units, while landlords are pushing for the right to do so.

There is no uniform rule on when and how government agencies should share earthquake risk with building owners and tenants. San Francisco has a searchable online map of 4,900 wood buildings that are at risk or have been at risk due to a “soft” first floor or poor support, and could do the same for concrete buildings in the future. More than 90% of soft storey buildings comply with a 2013 city ordinance requiring retrofits.

In 2013, Los Angeles residents frustrated by the lack of transparency began speculating on a list of “killer buildings” as city officials there debated what to do about concrete buildings at risk. Los Angeles passed a city ordinance in 2015 that it retrofits some concrete buildings and has a website for people to look up addresses. Property owners have 25 years to complete the work or demolish their building.

Friedman said he expects landlords to have a range of responses once they find out, from head-on denial to a yearning for reform. Either way, he said, discovery is inevitable.

“I really want the public to be able to have some confidence and have some disclosure about dangerous buildings,” he said.

“At some point we need to alert people and ask them to mitigate the risks of these types of very dangerous buildings,” he added.

Even creating the San Francisco list was a complicated process. City staff and volunteers began in 2018 by examining more than 1,200 paper maps from the 19th and 20th centuries, which people originally created for fire insurance underwriting purposes, and later annotated by hand over several years. Then they checked the data against information from other sources, such as the city evaluator’s office or observations from the sidewalk.

Even then, there is a limit to what inventory can reveal. The engineers said the only way to accurately measure the risks of a concrete building is for the engineer to do an on-site study, which might involve opening up the walls to see how they were built.

“You can’t walk into a building and see how it performs or what its weaknesses are,” Krause said.

This uncertainty, he added, has led some people to overlook the urgency.

“This is kind of a vulnerable building,” he said. “We’ve known it’s been going for 50 years, and that knowledge hasn’t translated into action because of the cost and effort of retrofitting.”

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