San Francisco Supervisors Support Sprinkler Mandate Delay

Members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors poured cold water on a fire safety requirement for older residential buildings in the city.

On Monday, a Board of Supervisors committee approved a five-year pause in a requirement to install fire sprinklers in pre-1974 condominium buildings across the city, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. If implemented, hundreds of residents in 126 buildings affected by the fire sprinkler ordinance would be subject to the law.

In December, Mayor Daniel Lurie introduced legislation to delay the program and create a committee to study its feasibility. Under the newly approved legislation, the 9,800 units subject to the sprinkler ordinance would have until 2032, and not 2027, to obtain permits for the sprinkler work. Most of the residences are in Nob Hill, Russian Hill, the Marina and Telegraph Hill. Supervisors Danny Sauter and Stephen Sherrill, whose district includes most of the impacted buildings, co-sponsored the bill.

The push to install fire sprinklers is part of the city’s fire code, which is updated every three years. The Board of Supervisors adopted the sprinkler ordinance in 2023, forcing certain buildings of 12 stories or more to add technology to resist fires for at least two hours. Such fire safety measures would cost between $200,000 and $300,000 per unit to install, according to estimates from some homeowners associations cited by the Chronicle. One fire sprinkler contractor who spoke at the Monday hearing pegged the per-unit figure at $60,000.

The creation of the original mandate did not include analysis of how the renovation work would impact individual condo owners or if it was financially feasible to install sprinklers in historic buildings, many of which sit on steep hills and have lead paint and asbestos, Eric Sandler, a retired assistant general manager for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, told the Chronicle.

“There was nothing about the financial impact of this measure on customers,” Sandler said. “I couldn’t believe it. If I had done something like this during my career I’d be fired.”

Some residents are calling for the ordinance to be abolished altogether, rather than city officials simply kicking the can down the road. “One thing I heard loud and clear is that what we are doing today, the changes to the fire code are not enough, that delay is not enough,” Sauter said at the hearing. “How we got here is a misuse of trust between residents and government and for my part I’ll do everything I can to try to correct that.”

The full Board of Supervisors still needs to approve the legislation in order to push sprinkler implementation until 2032.

— Chris Malone Méndez