Citywide Earthquake Retrofit Mandate In The Works, *And Why It Won’t Materialize

Corrections: Certain statements made in the original version of this article (published 5/5/25) were disputed by City officials at San Francisco’s Office of Resilience and Capital Planning. The author published these concerns and addressed them sequentially at the bottom of the article.

You’ll spot them everywhere once you know what to look for. Apartment buildings atop parking structures. Hillside homes on spindly stilts. Blockish mid-century concrete housing. All big-box and warehouse department stores. Seismically vulnerable structures come in every shape and size, each uniquely flawed, all susceptible to earthquakes.  

And San Francisco has plenty of them.

Remember: regulations are written in blood.

The 1971 Sylmar and 1994 Northridge earthquakes taught twentieth-century California the do’s and don’ts of building in Earthquake Country. One, rigidity is not our friend. For the longest time, many people believed hard = sturdy. Therefore, concrete structures enforced with rebar ought to withstand earthquakes—right? Lesson two: never, ever build with brick. They aren’t simply heavy, they crumble readily. Scores of innocent people have lost their lives in the process of finding out what can and cannot save us. 

It isn’t brick houses we have to worry about in San Francisco, it’s non-ductile concrete buildings. In the city, these buildings may potentially number in the thousands, and we’re getting closer to learning the actual figure. We do know that most (but not all) of the city’s seismically vulnerable structures appear concentrated in low-income neighborhoods. South of Market, portions of the Mission, and of course, the Tenderloin. The worst part is, the majority of these are homes (v.1).  

San Francisco Supervisor Rafael Mandelman had the facts ready for ABC7. 

“This is a category of buildings, largely concrete buildings, built prior to 1995…if they don’t have steel in them, which most of them [don’t, or] if it’s not steel in a particular way, [it] can be in very bad shape. In the event of a big earthquake, that can be very dangerous for residents or people working in those buildings.”

Who’s responsible for anticipating Mother Nature?

Supervisor Myrna Melgar has introduced an ordinance co-sponsored by Mandelman that would give City Hall better sense of SF’s vulnerable building stock. Senior seismic resilience strategist Laurel Mathews outlined the hypotheticals for earthquake-susceptible buildings like non-ductile concrete and big-box stores, also known as tilt-up buildings. 

“If this ordinance passes on Tuesday, building owners of concrete and tilt-up buildings will need to hire a structural or civil engineer, then fill out a screening form and return that form with some basic information to the city.” 

Steel-reinforced or not, non-ductile concrete will break in earthquakes for the same reason solid rock fractures under immense seismic pressure. Rock is not stretchy enough to accommodate excessive force; neither is concrete. This, and geologic conditions shared with San Francisco, is why thousands died during the 1985 M8.0 Mexico City earthquake.

If approved, the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection will have around six months to establish their program. Afterwards, property owners would have eighteen months to submit the screening form. So far, nobody has enacted an official retrofit mandate. For now, per Supervisor Mandelman, the objective is simply to collect information. 

“[There’s] No requirement yet that property owners actually do that work, although if you do own one of those properties, you may want to seriously consider doing that work, and at some point, we are going to have to require it,” he said.

Earthquakes are everybody’s problem. 

For many, the most obvious question is, Who’s going to pay for this? The San Francisco Chronicle recently estimated the cost of seismic retrofit at $300 to $3,200 per building (v.1). It’s going to take a ton of legwork on the part of qualified, third-party inspectors. While some buildings cannot hide their weak spots, others conceal it well. Conversely, some appear weak only to prove structurally sound upon investigation. Even if repairs are warranted, not every property owner will be able to afford the upgrade. 

Contractor and small property owner Matt Nichols shared his concerns with ABC7. 

“This legislation is well-intentioned, but does potentially open the door for very expensive repairs [and] remains to be seen who is going to pay for it,” he said. 

Supervisor Mandelman had this to say. 

“What kind of city resources might we be able to provide for property owners who may not have a ton of money? Can we create low interest or no interest loan programs? This is not a good year to be trying to solve that problem on the city budget side and it’s not frankly a good year for a lot of private property owners to be doing it either, but we are going to need to address this.”

The Peninsula segment of the 800 mile-long San Andreas Fault ruptures every 150–300 years or so, most recently in 1906. It is quietly storing strength for the next Big One. In the meantime, any of its six sister faults could hit the Bay Area with a significant earthquake (M7.0+). The Hayward Fault is the likeliest candidate with odds of a M6.7 or worse currently at 1 in 3. 

Corrections

I received an email this morning from the Office of the City Administrator, “on behalf of San Francisco’s Office of Resilience and Capital Planning, the City agency that developed concrete building legislation with the Department of Building Inspection and Supervisor Melgar.”

“We caught some corrections in Jake Warren’s article [v.1] about the legislation today, and we are hoping you will address them promptly.”

“The article’s title, ‘Citywide earthquake retrofit mandate in the works,’ is inaccurate. There is no retrofit mandate currently in the works. An accurate title, if I may make a suggestion, would be ‘Several thousand building owners may be required to assess if their structures could be at risk in an earthquake.’”

• Yes, you are correct. A retrofit mandate is not currently “in the works.” City Hall is taking only the most preliminary measures—testing the waters, as it were. But I want to discuss why a mandate is not in the works. I imagine such a mandate would be quickly ensnared by bureaucratic red tape. The nearly imperceptible crawl at which this problem is being addressed (indeed, SF has known about its at-risk buildings since at least 1994 when California state building codes were revised in the wake of the Northridge quake) suggests that by the time an enforceable ordinance goes into effect (an overly generous assumption), the Bay Area’s next major quake will have already exacted its toll. My earlier statement gave the City too much credit.

“Similarly, the caption under the first photo is incorrect – ‘The owners of several thousand San Francisco concrete buildings may be required to undergo seismic retrofits to prevent deadly collapse in a major earthquake.’ This should say ‘The owners of several thousand San Francisco buildings may be required to hire an engineer to assess whether their building could be at risk during an earthquake.’” 

• In my opinion, if you’re going to conduct a report on San Francisco’s vulnerable building stock to inform the feasibility of a seismic retrofit mandate, then the objective of mandating retrofits is in fact in the works. “Gather all materials” is simply the first step. I know City Hall prefers progress in painstaking, drawn-out phases (see: the Van Ness BRT lane installation). If having engineers assess thousands of buildings isn’t testing the viability of a citywide seismic retrofit mandate, whose time are you wasting? 

“This sentence should be corrected: ‘The San Francisco Chronicle recently estimated the cost of seismic retrofit at $300 to $3,200 per building.’ $300 – $3,200 is the estimated cost to hire an engineer to complete the building assessment form, not to complete a seismic retrofit.”

• All right, you can have this one. I should’ve triple-checked that fact/source. It could cost up to $3,200 just to assess a building’s seismic risk, not ameliorate it. So building owners may already be thousands of dollars in the red before a single nail is driven. Retrofitting non-ductile concrete buildings like those in the Tenderloin may cost far greater.
• Why doesn’t San Francisco work with the California Earthquake Authority on specific grants to incentivize landlords and building owners not only to entertain expensive engineering consults, but also pursue necessary, life-saving measures to reinforce the residence or workplace? I don’t see why CEA shouldn’t be involved. As the authority on earthquakes in California, what other agency can we turn to? 
• To make matters worse, securing federal funds to finance retrofit mandates seems very unlikely given Trump’s hatred for California, especially San Francisco. It’s fair to assume California is on its own for at least the next three years, all while Governor Newsom keeps a tight fist on the state’s gargantuan budget. 

“This sentence should also be corrected: ‘The worst part is, the majority of these are homes.’

“It is inaccurate to say that a majority of the buildings will be homes. We won’t know until the screening program is over. (On background, the City estimates the largest use by square foot will be office space, but again, we cannot know for sure without the screenings.)”

• Of course the City would estimate by square footage versus the permanent (residents) and transient (commuters) population. Square footage doesn’t center the number of lives on the line on any given day in San Francisco. It places property value above the value of human life, which should be the priority. Measuring by any other metric masks the severity of the issue and the city’s responsibility to fix it. 
• I based my conclusion on the Chronicle’s observation that many of these at-risk buildings are primarily concentrated in the Tenderloin and South of Market—low-income, multi-family homes. Whereas skyscrapers stand almost entirely unoccupied overnight, a fully rented non-ductile concrete building in the Tenderloin holds hundreds of residents day in, day out, year round. As such, while your correction is technically accurate, I wasn’t measuring by square footage, but the thousands of lives in danger (even more when you account for office workers). So, by your own logic, I should have said, “The worst part is, the majority of people at risk are residents.” And I agree. 
• While I have the luxury of your attention, I’ll say this. It is the responsibility of a government, civic, state, and federal, to care for its people. Superior building codes fall under that umbrella. Do not accept excuses; seismically active nations like New Zealand and Japan enforce better building codes than California does currently. At bare minimum (or, a contractor’s gold standard), California requires that buildings don’t collapse. Consequently, they can damn near fold in the initial quake, but bringing it to the brink of collapse still means the engineers did their job. As for repairs, restoration, and the lingering threat of aftershocks, you get stuck holding the bag. And if your neighbor’s building gets red-tagged, yours might too! Overall, California is building for a loss. The real worst part? The overwhelming level of death and devastation in store for San Francisco is entirely preventable.
  • “There are two main levels of resilience that [Japanese] engineers work towards: the first is to withstand smaller earthquakes, the type that a building might see three or four times in its lifespan in Japan. For this magnitude, any damage that requires repair is not acceptable. The building should be so well designed that it can escape these earthquakes unscathed.” Martha Henriques, “How Japan’s skyscrapers are built to survive earthquakes,” BBC, 2018.
  • “The California Building Code is a minimum requirement intended to protect life safety and prevent collapse. It allows damage, which means buildings may not be habitable or functional after a moderate or large earthquake.” State of California Seismic Safety Commission, 2018.

Thank you for your corrections, I hope this answers your questions.

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