Photo: Soft-story building collapsed during the Northridge earthquake, 1994. LA Times

On March 25, 2025 San Jose’s City Council voted unanimously to delay by a year the implementation of its Soft Story Retrofit Ordinance, originally approved on September 24, 2024. The ordinance, which requires seismic retrofit of certain wood frame multi-story residential buildings, will now begin implementation on April 1, 2026. The delay is in response to uncertainty around a $25 million Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) grant that would partially fund a Retrofit Financing Program, a public-private partnership, to defray the retrofit costs for property owners and limit tenant rent increases. The Retrofit Financing Program would offer participating property owners rebates through the FEMA grants and leverage City funds to offer low-cost retrofit financing.

Ensuring the safety of these buildings is crucial, not only to preserve this important stock of less expensive housing but also to prevent injury and loss of life in the event of an earthquake. This is a unique challenge in a city with a large amount of soft-story housing, home to some of the city’s most vulnerable residents, and the cost of retrofitting these homes is substantial. 

Soft-story buildings are susceptible to collapse during earthquakes because the ground floor is too weak to support the weight of the upper floors, endangering both structures and lives. The City of San Jose estimates there are about 3,500 soft-story buildings in San José, home to around 72,000 people. Soft-story buildings have large openings on the ground floor, such as a parking garage or retail space, which leaves the building without the necessary interior walls to resist the lateral motion of an earthquake. This type of construction is typical of most apartments built in the late-1960s and early-1970s, where parking spaces on the first floor, often referred to as “tuck-under parking,” provide insufficient structural support for the above apartment units.

At the time they were constructed, these buildings met the building codes and structural requirements, but over time, they have proven to be highly vulnerable to collapse and failure in earthquakes. The 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles brought this vulnerability to the attention of the engineering community and building departments. That event resulted in 57 deaths and more than 8,700 injured persons, the majority as the result of the catastrophic collapse of soft-story buildings. After years of work assessing the prevalence, risks, and potential solutions for soft-story buildings, San Jose’s City Council adopted an ordinance to address the issue on September 24, 2024. The ordinance requires soft-story apartments throughout the city to be retrofitted. It includes a timetable for the work to be completed, a framework to defray some of the costs for landlords, and provisions to limit the retrofit cost that can be passed on to tenants of soft-story apartments.

Although the City applied for the FEMA grant in August 2023, the grant had not been awarded before the new federal administration took office, and staff indicate that FEMA has become unresponsive. San Jose’s Measure E funds, originally intended primarily to fund the development of deed-restricted affordable housing, have also been identified previously as a potential source of money to offset the cost of soft story retrofits, despite the lack of any requirement to ensure these homes remain affordable. However, Measure E funds are limited and dependent on market conditions, and in recent years the Council has reprogrammed nearly all of it to support interim shelter operations. 

The impact of rent increases on tenants supports the need to offset retrofit costs.

The adopted ordinance provides some guardrails on the ability of landlords to fund these required retrofits by increasing the rent of the people living in the homes. The ordinance limits the annual increases to the 5% cap currently allowed under the City’s Apartment Rent Ordinance. Many soft-story housing residents live at the lowest income levels, and even small rent increases may make them more vulnerable to displacement or homelessness: 

A 2020 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office finds that for every $100 increase in median rent, homelessness increases by 9%. 

In September 2024, Council directed staff to conduct further research on the impact that this ordinance would have on tenants in soft-story buildings, cross-referenced with data around tenants that are currently rent-burdened and extremely rent-burdened, to capture the potential impact of a 5% rent increase on already vulnerable households. Staff will also continue to monitor the impact of the program on tenants and landlords throughout program implementation.