California earthquake retrofit funding canceled by feds, affecting thousands of families

San Francisco Chronicle​

15-05-2025

The federal government cancelled more than $30 million in grant funding for seismic retrofits slated to help thousands of California families who live in buildings that could collapse in a major earthquake.
The retrofit program was set to open applications soon to eligible building owners across 11 California cities including San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose. But the Federal Emergency Management Agency cancelled the grants last month.
'It's absolutely devastating,' said Stephanie Stephens, mitigation director at the California Residential Mitigation Program, which would have administered the grant. 'That's thousands of individuals that are going to be less safe when the next Big One comes.'
The grants were among the more than $3 billion in cancelled Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grants, a program to fund natural disaster mitigation projects nationwide. FEMA slashed the funding on April 5, calling former President Joe Biden's BRIC program 'wasteful and ineffective' and 'more concerned with political agendas than helping Americans affected by natural disasters.'
About $870 million of the cancelled funding was slated for California initiatives, according to the state's Office of Emergency Services. The projects included the retrofits, a $50 million coastal resilience project at the Port of San Francisco, $50 million for flood adaptation in Oakland and Alameda and $2.5 million to build levees in Grayson and Walnut Creek.
'This decision will have severe consequences for local communities that were counting on funds to reduce the impact of natural disasters,' Rhodesia Ransom (D-Stockton) said at a state Assembly Emergency Management Committee meeting Monday. Ransom has introduced a joint resolution to urge FEMA to reinstate the funding, noting that the cancelled grants also jeopardized hundreds of millions of dollars in local, state and private sector matching funds.
The retrofit program, which is overseen by the California Earthquake Authority and the California Office of Emergency Services, would have used the BRIC grants to speed the implementation of retrofits that experts say are essential but that can be costly for landlords.
Between 750 and 1,500 multi-family buildings, containing five to ten housing units each, could have been retrofitted using the grant money, Stephens estimated.
It would have targeted a building type known to be especially vulnerable in a major earthquake: soft story buildings. That generally refers to wood-frame buildings constructed before 1990, where residential units are stacked above a 'soft' first story — often a parking garage, open storage unit or commercial space. A major earthquake can cause those weak first floors to collapse, toppling or trapping the residential units above them.
Soft story buildings made up close to half of the 16,000 housing units in San Francisco that were left uninhabitable immediately after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Seismic retrofits can prevent collapse on that scale — but can be expensive.
Though CRMP has a separate grant program to support retrofits of soft story single-family homes, it does not include multi-family soft stories. Establishing a multi-family retrofit program seemed like 'a natural next step,' Stephens said. 'There was no statewide seismic retrofit funding source for multi-family buildings — we saw the need.'
Many California cities have passed ordinances mandating soft story retrofits for both single- and multi-family buildings, but the high cost of making the seismic upgrades can make compliance challenging, Stephens said. The BRIC grants were intended to help landlords make the potentially life-saving alterations more quickly.
The program would have been open to owners of five- to ten-unit buildings in eleven cities with mandatory ordinances: Beverly Hills, Burbank, Culver City, Los Angeles, Oakland, Pasadena, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Monica, Torrance and West Hollywood. CRMP was planning to prioritize applications from buildings in low-income neighborhoods, Stephens said.
Participating landlords would have been eligible to be reimbursed up to $7,000 for design and engineering fees and then up to about $4,200 per unit, for a maximum of about $50,000 per building. That would have covered a significant chunk of owners' costs, because retrofitting a multi-family soft-story building can cost anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000, Stephens said.
CRMP had been reimbursed for about $7 million of the planned $40 million award and had finished the program development phase, Stephens said. With the rest of the funding pulled, the program can't move forward.
'There will be $33 million in funding that we will never get to see,' Stephens said.
Without the grant, eligible building owners will still be required to make the retrofits to comply with mandatory city ordinances, but they'll have to foot more of the bill. In some cities, including Oakland, landlords could pass on most of the cost of retrofits to tenants, because retrofits can be counted as capital improvements.
'We learned during our outreach efforts that many building owners were struggling to afford these costly retrofits, and were requesting extensions or did not meet their ordinance's deadline to complete their retrofits due to lack of funding,' Stephens said in a statement.
The vast majority of San Francisco's nearly 5,000 soft-story buildings — about 94% — have been retrofitted in compliance with the city's mandatory ordinance, according to Laurel Mathews, a senior earthquake resilience analyst for the city. The ordinance went into effect in 2013 and its deadline was in 2021.
Oakland passed its own mandatory soft story retrofit ordinance in 2019. At least 24,000 residential units, or about 11% of the city's rental stock, are located in soft-story buildings, according to the city.
A similar ordinance in San Jose will go into effect next year, after the city council approved a one-year delay in March. San Jose has about 3,500 soft-story buildings containing about 25,000 housing units, including 15,000 rent stabilized units, according to its legislation.
CRMP's two other retrofit programs, which fund upgrades for soft story single-family homes and for homes with raised foundations or crawl spaces, seem safe for now, Stephens said. Those programs are also supported by FEMA grants, but the funds come through the agency's Hazard Mitigation Grant Program and have not been terminated, Stephens said.
Stephens said CRMP is being 'proactive' and working with CalOES to look for other ways to support multi-family soft story retrofits. But so far, she said, they have yet to pin down an alternative funding source for the important upgrades.