Oakland

The City of Oakland has developed a program called Safer Housing for Oakland - A Retrofit Program for Soft Story Apartment Buildings. In 2007, Oakland passed a voluntary ordinance for seismic strengthening for residential buildings. In 2008, the City conducted a city-wide building inventory to identify the City’s inventory of potential soft-story buildings. In 2009, the City adopted an ordinance which mandated a screening program to verify the city’s inventory of potential soft-story buildings. 

A mandatory ordinance was developed, titled Mandatory Seismic Evaluation and Retrofit of Certain Multi-Unit Residential Buildings, Ordinance 13516, which went into effect on January 22, 2019.

2008 Building Inventory and 2009 Mandatory Screening Program

In 2008, the municipality conducted a preliminary survey of multifamily residential buildings. With the results of that survey, Oakland passed a mandatory ordinance in 2009 requiring owners of certain buildings identified in the 2008 survey to undergo a structural screening of the ground floor. The screening was intended to provide the municipality with more information on the construction of the ground floor to determine whether it is considered a wood-frame soft-story building. All building owners who received a notice from the building official indicating that their building falls within the scope of the 2009 mandatory screening program were required to submit a structural screening to the building official within two years of the day the ordinance was passed on July 28, 2009.

The full text of the ordinance can be found here. The results of the building inventory and screening are available here.

2019 Ordinance Scope

Ordinance 13516 states that the mandatory wood-frame soft-story program applies to existing buildings that have the following characteristics:

• Wood-frame target story (“target story” generally includes any above grade or partially above grade level that is more vulnerable to damage than the level directly above)
• Constructed or permitted for construction prior to January 1, 1991 (or designed under the 1985 or earlier editions of the Uniform Building Code)
• Five or more dwelling units

Owners who believed their building was not a subject building per the above characteristics were required to submit an exemption petition by February 21, 2020.

For owners of buildings that are subject to the Ordinance, they were provided a Compliance Tier, which determined the mandated deadlines for ordinance compliance.