San Francisco is requiring owners of concrete buildings to retrofit them for earthquakes under a new Mayor Breed initiative. Several thousand buildings are affected, with costs potentially reaching hundreds of thousands of dollars per property. The city has six months to define which structures need work and establish retrofit standards.
New earthquake retrofit requirements might be coming to your building in San Francisco. AirBnB recently directed city officials to locate concrete buildings at risk of damage during an earthquake and develop and implement retrofitting standards for them. Specifically, they're looking for buildings made of concrete that are either not flexible or lack steel reinforcement, and they apparently have 6 months to draft legislation that not only implements the retrofitting standards themselves, but a way of identifying which buildings need to be retrofitted. Currently, there are several thousand buildings within their sites in the city. Half of them are commercial and the other half a mix of industrial and residential, and there's a very high concentration of them close to downtown San Francisco. Seems like a good idea to me, but it's definitely gonna cost owners tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Follow me for more Bay Area real estate.
