San Francisco to Require Landlords Pay for Seismic Inspections

Landlords across San Francisco must soon foot the bill to make sure their 4,000 buildings are seismically sound.

The Board of Supervisors approved a safety program that encourages building owners to carry out retrofits after years of warnings that older concrete buildings have greater risks from earthquakes, the San Francisco Examiner reported.

The retrofits are voluntary. But the new program requires owners of potentially vulnerable buildings to foot the bill for a professional risk assessment of their buildings.

An estimated cost of inspecting the thousands of buildings — let alone retrofitting them — was not disclosed.

“It’s really difficult to know the true risk and true impact without first understanding the scale of the challenge,” Laurel Mathews, a senior earthquake resilience analyst for the city, told a committee meeting on the issue.

For several decades, San Francisco has completed several seismic retrofits, including requiring landlords to shore up the ground floors in thousands of soft-story, wood-framed buildings, completed in 2021.

That leaves the risk posed by older concrete buildings, which city officials say lack the steel reinforcements that reduce the risk of major earthquake damage.

They say that’s mostly because retrofitting concrete buildings is costly and time consuming. In residential buildings, it can also mean moving tenants out while work is completed.

Whatever the inconvenience, however, the risks for San Francisco remain daunting.

Mathews pointed to the Pyne Gould building in Christchurch, New Zealand, built in the 1960s before modern building standards. The five-story building collapsed in 2011 during a major earthquake, killing 18 people trapped inside.

“We don’t expect every concrete building to perform this poorly in an earthquake,” Mathews told the committee. But the accident “demonstrates the worst-case scenario that we’re trying to avoid.”

— Dana Bartholomew