Los Angeles earthquake-damaged building restoration data is years out of date

For nearly a decade, Los Angeles has boasted a comprehensive earthquake safety code — the most stringent in the country, requiring thousands of buildings to be assessed and reinforced if necessary.

But city officials haven't made it easy for Los Angeles residents to find renovation information for their buildings.

In 2023, The Times asked the city for lists of non-ductile concrete and soft-story buildings, as well as their renovation status. After publishing a map that allowed Los Angeles residents to review the earthquake risk their buildings might face, The Times contacted several property owners who said the city’s data suggested their buildings had not been renovated, when in fact they had.

The misinformation has caused concern among landlords who have lost leases with potential tenants who believe their buildings’ seismic retrofits have not been completed. Many residents have expressed fear for the safety of their families living in an unrenovated building.

Once the Times learned of the errors, editors added a note to readers about the article, and reporters began checking permit records and inquiring with the city. The full extent of the problems did not become clear until eighteen months later.

In a July 25 video call, officials explained the errors to New York Times reporters and acknowledged that for years, the Building and Safety Administration had incorrectly reported which buildings had been renovated and which had not.

“The modification database system relies heavily on manual entry and manual modification of reports, which while adequate for individual implementation purposes, has not been able to produce program-level reports to the standards we desire,” said Jill Gaddy, public information manager for the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety, in a statement. “We take this seriously and will take steps to automate the reporting system to ensure the accuracy of all reports.”

In response to inquiries from The New York Times, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass asked the administration to create a task force to review the records, automate its manual work with the data, and hire an independent auditor.

“Los Angeles residents deserve to know the status of the modifications to the buildings they live in, own, or are considering living in,” Clara Karger, a spokeswoman for Bass, said in an email.

Questions from The Times prompted the city in February to stop issuing monthly reports on seismic progress.

Since the ordinance went into effect nine years ago, the city has published detailed reports on how many buildings are in compliance, which are in operation and which have submitted plans. The mayor’s office has promoted the program by pointing to the reports, which are also used by trade groups like the Southern California Structural Engineers Association, to hold city officials accountable for their work on renovations.

The Times’s questions about the city’s records began even before the map was published. But what initially appeared to be isolated flaws in the data—including the listing of Los Angeles City Hall as not updated, when its seismic update was completed in 2001—were actually signs of inaccurate data processing.

Times reporters spent months reviewing more than a thousand city permits, speaking to numerous building owners and tenants to understand discrepancies and question the city’s incorrect data.

On January 16, in response to inquiries about specific buildings — including several large commercial buildings in the Broadway Theater District that were incorrectly classified as unfurnished — officials said in an email:[The department] “We are confident that our data regarding the update is correct. We will closely review the headlines provided to us by the Los Angeles Times.”

By then, The Times had identified at least 56 buildings, both soft-story and non-ductile concrete, that had been incorrectly classified. One example: A large commercial building on Broadway was undergoing renovation in 2021, but city records showed it was incomplete.

After further questions the following month, building officials acknowledged in an email that the data did not match. For the list of non-ductile concrete buildings and soft-story buildings, “the data in the exported spreadsheet did not fully match our internal databases.”

Officials later admitted that the main reason for the errors was the city’s failure to accurately combine two databases—one for building permits and one for addresses. The city’s database mistakenly linked irrelevant permit information to a list of buildings requiring seismic retrofitting. This led to many buildings being incorrectly labeled.

“We realized from the IT side that multiple permits could have been issued reflecting work on one building. We know the links are incorrect and we have to review the data building by building,” said Minh Ong, a civil engineer at the Department of Building and Safety.

The Times map originally listed 73 non-ductile concrete buildings renovated in Los Angeles. In the months after the errors were discovered, the Building and Safety Administration gave different numbers: In January, it said 73 concrete buildings had been renovated; in April, 91; and in mid-July, 127. In a final list sent out on July 25, the agency said the number was 101.

However, a New York Times analysis of the city’s most recent data shows that at least four buildings were classified as not ready for rehabilitation when they had already been reinforced, according to city permits.

So far, officials have updated the renovation information for at least 10 non-ductile concrete buildings based on evidence provided by The New York Times. Two architectural and engineering firms confirmed to a reporter that the building department had contacted them to verify the records based on what The New York Times’s reading of permits showed.

The status of the city's soft-story buildings, which mostly consist of residential apartments, remains unclear.

After the July video call, city officials said they would share the corrected soft-story records the next day. Two days later, the administration said it would overhaul its database and hire an auditor. The New York Times removed the city’s data from its map.

The mayor's office acknowledged that the process of correcting the building department's records could take months. According to city data, Los Angeles has 12,347 one-story buildings and 1,194 concrete buildings.

Meanwhile, residents still want to know how to check the update status in their homes and workplaces.

Emily Giltinan was looking for a place to move and when she was researching earthquake safety she came across a Times map.

“I was very disturbed,” she said. “How safe are the buildings we live in? Basically, the answer wasn’t good.”

Giltinan tried using the city’s permit portal to search for buildings but couldn’t find complete records of potential buildings in her neighborhood. When she called the department’s hotline, she said a representative told her “not to worry about earthquakes” because they happen “once in a while and it’s not a big deal.”

As Giltinan spoke to The Times in a phone interview, Los Angeles residents felt a 4.9-magnitude earthquake in the Mojave Desert.

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