Bay Area Cities Eligible For State Earthquake Retrofit Grants

Anyone know how much estimate it will cost for earthquake retrofit work ?

I suppose it depends on the extent of what you want done. Adding crimple walls throughout would be hugely expensive (tearing out current walls) but basic foundation bolting stuff might not be too bad.

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When was your house built?

1960s…older than me

Is this for primary home only? $6M for the whole state seems a drop in the bucket

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If you don’t have cripple walls, seismic upgrading is not really necessary…

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If your house is sandwiched between 2 neighbors, is it still necessary to do seismic work? Will the house fall to the front or back?

Even if doesn’t fall the damage can mean condemnation…Probably should talk to your neighbors if you want to do a seismic upgrade…if you share common walls

Well, you are talking about classic building style in the Fab 7x7 and yes buildings over what 4-5 units/stories with soft storage space had to have seismic work done.

I still don’t really understand what a soft story is. If you have a garage, then you have a soft story?

What’s the remedy? Reinforce foundation, or simply add a few posts? Someone mentions it only cost a few thousand dollars to do the soft story work, not sure if that’s typical.

1-4 units are not required to fix soft story. Is it worth doing at all?

Living area over a garage…classic soft story…Steel frame around garage door classic fix…

By definition:

Steel frame around garage door seems to be an inexpensive fix. Maybe everyone should do it even without government intervention.

From what year did they start using steel frame around garage door for new construction? Is it easy to tell whether it’s already there?

Well is not cheap plus you need to beef up the foundation under it…$10k installed

More on earthquake retrofitting…

True, but very few flat lot homes have cripple walls

Crawl space is fairly common in older flat neighborhoods. Does a crawl space mean a cripple wall?

Lucky for you - most Sunset Homes don’t have crawl space… BUT the garage facing side may needs some strengthening up

Agreed, which is why I did the foundation bolting, main beam bracing using some heavy duty brackets and cripple walls on the ground floor at least. Def easy to do things like this during the remodel…