Infrastructure protectionTurning excess space into apartments as an incentive for earthquake-retrofitting of buildings

San Francisco is dealing with a housing shortage at the same time that city officials are trying to get landlords to retrofit buildings which are at risk of crumpling during a severe earthquake.

In 2013, Mayor Ed Lee approved a bill that mandates retrofits for soft-story multi-unit residential buildings over the next four to seven years. Roughly 4,800 buildings of two or more stories, containing five or more apartment units, which were approved for construction before January 1978, have to be retrofitted, according to the mandate. The city estimates retrofitting cost to run between $60,000 and $130,000 per building. The plan has faced backlash from property owners insisting that they lack the money or would have to increase rent prices to fund retrofits. In response, Scott Wiener, a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, recently proposed that building owners of at-risk apartment buildings be allowed to finance earthquake retrofits by converting garages, basements, and other excess space into apartments. Current zoning laws ban the addition of new units in these buildings, but a zoning change would bring in thousands of dollars from new apartment rentals, more than enough to cover the cost of retrofitting the buildings. The plan would also increase the city’s housing stock.

“I could see it potentially being a few thousand new units,” Wiener told Citiscope. We’re in the midst of a housing crisis here in San Francisco,” he added. Since 2003, San Francisco’s population has increased by roughly 85,000 residents, but only 20,000 new housing units have been developed. “Production is not keeping up with population growth. It’s not surprising that rents have exploded.”

Wiener notes that his proposal, which will be decided on by the Board of Supervisors in February, would require new units in buildings under the city’s rent-control law to be subject to that law, resulting in more rent controlled housing.

Wiener’s proposal is similar to a program in Israel intended to give building owners a financial self-interest in retrofitting their buildings in a timely manner. The country lies along the Dead Sea Rift, an active fault system responsible for the magnitude 7.3 Gulf of Aqaba earthquake in 1995. In 2005, Israel’s “National Outline Plan” for earthquake reinforcement and retrofitting, known as TAMA 38, was established to bring buildings built before 1980 into compliance with the country’s seismic safety standards. Over 700,000 homes in the country were vulnerable to collapse during a major earthquake. TAMA 38 has been revised three times, most recently in May 2012, and like Wiener’s plan, it allows property owners to add rentable units to buildings as they retrofit them.

“The third edition made a big difference,” said Sagi Tamari, a senior city planner for Tel Aviv.

Though Wiener’s plan for San Francisco does not allow the addition of new floors to existing structures, building owners in Israel are allowed to add two floors atop existing buildings or to new buildings constructed in the same site, and are also allowed to add twenty-five square meters to each apartment unit. The program has encouraged hundreds of property owners to retrofit their buildings, Tamari said. “Today, we have hundreds of applications for approval, compared to before when we had, maybe, less than a hundred in a year.”

One criticism of TAMA 38 is that while it has improved the safety of buildings in large cities such as Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, and Haifa, it has done little for vulnerable buildings in small cities, simply because developers expect to profit more from new apartment units in large cities. “This is what is running the program,” Tamari says. “Not really the fear of an earthquake. It’s become a real estate tool.”