What will a major earthquake from the Covid era mean for the Gulf region | California

When a major earthquake strikes the San Francisco Bay Area, it will make no distinction: It will shake homes, schools, and hospitals regardless of race, income, or age. But its impact on the population will not be equal.

As with many things in this iconic California area, lower-income residents, often colorful communities, will bear the brunt of the disaster. Experts say much of this risk has to do with housing, one that could be magnified by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Home to the headquarters of companies like Twitter and Facebook, major universities including Stanford and University of California, Berkeley, and the nation’s largest startup scene, the Bay Area has some of the highest housing costs in the United States. The average home price in the Bay Area is $ 950,000, and although rents have fallen since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the average rent in San Francisco is still $ 3,200 per month for a one-bedroom apartment. Meanwhile, the region suffers from a chronic shortage of hundreds of thousands of homes and an ever-increasing homelessness crisis.

The staggering costs leave these low-income residents not yet forced out of the area with limited options about where to live – increasing the likelihood that they will end up in older, more dangerous buildings and less likely to control their homes. Or a flat designed to withstand a large earthquake.

We know enough about earthquakes to be able to do something about it Dana Brischwald, Earthquake Engineering Research Institute

A major earthquake is inevitable. The Gulf region sits above seven “large” fault lines, and experts say the region is likely to experience a 7.0-magnitude earthquake over the next three decades.

“There are a lot of tenants or low-income people in the most vulnerable housing, they don’t have a lot of options in housing, and they don’t have as much control over it as people who own their homes or have the resources to do earthquake work,” said Dana Prishwald, president of the Northern California branch of the Research Institute Earthquake engineering.

This choice is likely to be further narrowed by the pandemic. The job losses caused by the health crisis disproportionately affected low-wage workers, many of whom were renters. This leaves more residents burdened with the cost when it comes to housing, especially now that federal relief funds from the pandemic have expired. Meanwhile, the country is suffering huge losses in tax revenue due to the pandemic, which means it will have less money to tackle issues like the housing crisis.

Rescue dogs were placed at a site to start the search for destroyed homes in the Marine District of San Francisco following the 1989 earthquake.Photo: Eric Risberg / Associated Press

The people at particular risk in the event of an earthquake are people who live in so-called “soft-storey” buildings – multi-storey apartment buildings with log structures constructed according to ancient building codes. Imagine an apartment building seated on a garage or storefront. The ground floor design that accommodates cars or commercial space makes the building “soft” or unstable and prone to swaying in the event of an earthquake. This increases the risk of collapse.

The Association of Gulf Region Governments, a regional planning agency, estimates that the Gulf region has around 18,000 two-story buildings with around 140,000 rental units. In the event of a major earthquake along the Hayward or San Andreas fault lines, they estimate nearly two-thirds of the housing destroyed would be units in smooth-storey buildings.

“There is enough information publicly available about the most dangerous types of buildings,” Prishwald said. “If you are a building owner and you are not aware, you are intentionally burying your head in the sand.”

Building improvements such as seismic retrofits can help improve a building’s chances of withstanding severe vibration, but low-income tenants often have little leverage to compel property owners to make such upgrades.

Some local governments have decided not to wait for owners to take the lead. For example, the city of Alameda enacted a mandatory retrofit law in 2009. San Francisco and Berkeley followed suit in 2013 and 2014, respectively, as did some cities in other parts of the state.

However, the pandemic could delay some retrofit schedules. The San Francisco Small Business Commission, for example, has suggested extending the retrofit deadline due to the economic downturn, and additional adjustments could put stress on small businesses that often occupy the ground floor of these buildings. Without tenant protections in place, there are also concerns that landlords will pass up retrofit costs under the mandates.

However, as Sarah Karlinsky, senior advisor to the Urban Planning Institute for Public Policy at Spur, said: “If you fail to adjust the existing housing stock, you risk mass displacement after an earthquake.”

This is due in large part to the way federal disaster relief programs operate, according to Mary Comerio, a professor in the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. These programs were initially designed to support the repair of infrastructure and help middle-class homeowners deal with flooding in the Midwest. It has evolved over the years, but at its core, it is still centered around those goals. In other words, there is little federal help for renters, who are more likely to have low incomes.

Moreover, affordable housing is seldom completely replaced after major disasters, Comerio said. She notes that it took 10 years to replace only 75% of the affordable housing damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. On the other hand, most single-family homes were repaired within two years. Research shows, too, that in the aftermath of the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Southern California, areas with low-income Latino and non-English speaking people received less assistance compared to the size of the damage, and were slower to recover from an earthquake.

The mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, bends under a desk with elementary school students during last year’s training. Photography: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Hurricane Katrina, which wiped out parts of New Orleans in 2005 and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, is another clear example. “We still face massive housing problems in New Orleans,” says Comerio. “Almost no public housing has been rebuilt, and almost no apartments have been rebuilt [since Katrina]. Many of the people who left never came back. “

In the short term, those with fewer resources at their disposal are likely to spend more time in shelters, as authorities fear Covid-19 infections and in hotels. In the long term, in the absence of adequate affordable housing, low-income tenants will likely be permanently displaced from the expensive rental markets in the Gulf region.

“If you are a tenant, and your building is damaged, you have absolutely no control over whether or not it will be repaired and how quickly that schedule occurs,” says Brechwald. And then, of course, the more buildings are damaged, the tighter the housing market is. We saw that in Santa Rosa after the fire. Rented people who do not have many resources. They will just leave. “

Sonoma County is already facing a shortage of affordable and available housing, with about 5,300 homes lost in the Santa Rosa fire of 2017. Housing costs soared in the wake, and the US Census Bureau report notes that many residents left, possibly as a direct result: between July 2017 and July 2018, the county lost more than 3,000 residents.

But this is not a problem without a solution. Experts have several suggestions. Authorities can modernize federal housing programs to provide disaster assistance not only to homeowners, but also to renters. A statewide mandatory retrofit program can also help, in place of the existing patchwork of local mandates.

“In my opinion, we know enough about earthquakes to be able to do something about it,” Prishwald said. And it’s not really a technical problem – it’s a people problem or a political problem.

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