Department of Building Inspection Annual Report

3. Strengthening Building Seismic Safety Through Enforcement and Outreach As DBI oversees the building safety of more than 200,000 residential and commercial buildings in properties in San Francisco, located in one of the world's highest at-risk zones, we know how important it is to keep our community seismically safe through preparation and education. DBI has developed and enforces various earthquake preparedness programs throughout the city to protect our buildings and to prepare our citizens. Mandatory Soft Story Program The Mandatory Soft Story Retrofit Program was created in 2013 as a multi-year community-based effort enforced by DBI to ensure the safety and resilience of San Francisco's housing stock. It requires property owners to retrofit of older, wood-framed, multi-family buildings in San Francisco with a soft-story condition at risk of collapse. As a first phase requirement of this program, all affected property owners were noticed beginning in September 2013 to submit screening forms to DBI by September 15, 2014. DBI has achieved over a 99% response to the first phase. Buildings that have not complied with this requirement were placarded, issued Notices of Violation and processed through code enforcement. DBI is working with property owners to comply with the second and third phase of the process, which requires a permit application to be filed and construction work to be completed in the next two years. IN REVIEW Private School Seismic Safety Program, per Ordinance 202–14 Established in November 2014, the Private School Earthquake Program went into effect, requiring existing private elementary and secondary schools in San Francisco to obtain an earthquake evaluation of their buildings. This program strives to provide greater transparency of the seismic safety of private school buildings. Under State law, existing private schools are not required to meet the same rigorous safety requirements as public schools. Visit sfdbi.org/privateschool for more information. 14 DBI FY 2014 –

Department of Building Inspection Annual Report | Page 14