Hundreds of San Francisco property owners will have an extra year to meet the city’s seismic retrofit requirements under an ordinance Supervisor Rafael Mandelman introduced Tuesday.
The measure, which will delay the soft-story retrofit deadline until Sept. 15, 2021, is meant to provide a bit of relief to the owners and tenants of 415 buildings at a time when small businesses are reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, Mandelman said. The buildings are all residential, and most have ground-floor commercial spaces.
Even before the pandemic, many retailers failed to reopen after closing for a seismic retrofit, Mandelman said. With many businesses just starting up again after months of closure, the idea of having to close for another month or two could be a significant setback for them, he added.
“If you have ground-floor businesses hanging on by their fingernails, the last thing you want to do is cut off the ledge,” Mandelman said.
A Small Business Commission survey of 180 soft-story retrofits completed in 2018 and 2019 found that 46% of the ground-floor businesses did not reopen after the work was completed, according to commission director Regina Dick-Andrizzi.
She said that the Small Business Commission recommended a two-year deadline delay, but that the one-year extension would be helpful in giving property owners and their commercial tenants time to figure out a retrofit schedule that would do the least damage.
“We want to ensure that we are providing extra time so there is flexibility for both the property owner and the business,” she said.
Mandelman said the one-year delay could be extended another year depending on what happens with the pandemic and the economy.
Introduced in 2013, the Department of Building Inspection’s mandatory soft-story retrofit program applies to wood-frame residential buildings that contain a “soft” ground floor — typically a retail space or garage — that makes the building susceptible to earthquake damage. Most of the city’s 115,000 soft-story buildings have now been strengthened or have filed plans to do so — the department says it has a 99% compliance rate.
Mandelman’s extension would apply to buildings comprising the fourth and final tier of the program, located in designated liquefaction zones. Those zones include the Marina, Dogpatch, Mission Bay, Bayview, North Beach, and parts of the Mission, the Haight and other neighborhoods. It also includes buildings near Ocean Beach.
Yaser Awadalla, who owns Nizario’s Pizza, called the reprieve “a very good idea.” He had been expecting to have to shut down his Valencia Street location for more than a month before the September deadline. One of of his family’s three pizza parlors — on 18th Street in the Castro — recently went out of business.
“It gives small businesses like ours a chance to recover from COVID,” he said. “We are not in good shape right now. If I had to close again, I’d lose a lot of business.”
Mandelman said the retrofits are important in preparing for the next big earthquake, but that the September deadline was going to be tough to meet for businesses fighting for survival.
“Giving the folks another year makes a lot of sense,” he said.
DBI Interim Director Patrick O’Riordan said the department supports the extension.
“We understand the challenges property owners are facing during this health crisis and acknowledge they may need more time to meet this important deadline,” he said.
J.K. Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jdineen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfjkdineen
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