Written by Mayor Eric Garcetti, the ordinance targets two of the most dangerous types of buildings: brittle concrete buildings and wood apartment complexes with weak first stories, which have killed more than 65 people in Los Angeles’ last two major earthquakes.
The mandatory upgrades will be costly. Many wood apartment retrofits can cost between $60,000 to $130,000, and taller concrete buildings can cost millions of dollars to strengthen.
City Hall has long ignored calls by structural engineers and the city's own building officials to require privately owned buildings to be fixed. But in the last two years, Garcetti and the City Council have had a dramatic change of perspective.
Failing to act could not only cause a high death toll in the next earthquake, they say, but could destroy large swaths of Los Angeles’ housing, render entire commercial districts uninhabitable and hobble the city’s economy for a generation.
“For the city of Los Angeles, we finally took our head out of the sand,” Garcetti said last year. “We can’t be that city that takes years, even decades, to get back to where we are today.”
Owner groups now say they agree that fixing the buildings is essential.
“We want the buildings to be safe,” said Martha Cox-Nitikman, vice president of the Building Owners and Managers Assn. of Greater Los Angeles. “But we need to figure out how we get people there without ruining businesses.”
Wood apartments will be given seven years to complete construction once an owner is ordered by the Department of Building and Safety to retrofit the building. Owners of brittle concrete buildings will have 25 years to do the work.
How the retrofits will be paid for is a work in progress.
The City Council has not decided how costs will be shared between tenants and owners of residential buildings. The law currently allows owners to increase rents up to $75 a month to pay for a required earthquake retrofit, but both sides say they do not think Los Angeles renters can afford such a hike.
The city’s housing department has suggested that renters and owners pay for the retrofit on a 50-50 basis, allowing owners to charge a monthly maximum surcharge of $38 to pay for the seismic retrofit. (Apartments in Los Angeles built before Oct. 1, 1978, are generally under rent control, which means the city restricts how much the rent can be increased annually.)
To help pay for the costs, apartment groups are looking for additional financial support, such as breaks on property and state income taxes and business license and building permit fees for owners who retrofit.
Renters are also hoping that additional financial help will enable owners to pay the lion’s share, if not all, of the cost of the retrofit.
“Our goal is to protect these buildings,” said Jim Clarke of the Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, “and not lose affordable housing in the city.”
“We do support making these units safe,” said Larry Gross, executive director of the Coalition for Economic Survival, but he added that keeping costs low for tenants is essential. “It can’t be on the backs of those least able to pay.”
Owners of concrete buildings will face a significantly steeper price tag. Building owners are hoping the city will give incentives, such as waiving the city’s gross receipts tax, for businesses to move back into retrofitted buildings.
The idea of requiring earthquake retrofits in Los Angeles did not come easily, even though about 50 people died in concrete-building collapses in the 1971 Sylmar earthquake and 16 people were crushed to death in the Northridge Meadows apartment complex in the 1994 earthquake.
Just a decade ago, the City Council did not support even counting the number of brittle concrete buildings in Los Angeles. Some business interests remained skeptical that concrete buildings posed a real risk of collapse.
But in 2011, the deadly nature of concrete buildings became clear again when an earthquake struck New Zealand’s third-largest city, Christchurch, in 2011. The collapse of just two concrete office towers killed 133 people.
Following that earthquake, The Times embarked on an investigation to see how many concrete buildings there were in Los Angeles, and establish where they were, because there was no publicly available list of these buildings.
As part of the investigation, a team of Times reporters mined thousands of city and county records to identify concrete buildings. The Times found more than 1,000 buildings in Los Angeles that appeared to be concrete. Many were in the city’s busiest commercial districts: downtown, Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood and Ventura Boulevard.
The Times found that only a small fraction of concrete buildings were retrofitted, according to an analysis of building records of 68 of them.
After the story ran, Garcetti began an expansive campaign to address earthquake safety, and appointed U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Lucy Jones as his earthquake science advisor. Jones, a telegenic scientist who has been a reassuring voice on Southern California radio and television stations after earthquakes, began canvassing the city, bluntly warning residents and owners of how dangerous it would be to do nothing, particularly for concrete buildings.
“They are the deadliest buildings when they fall,” Jones once said of concrete buildings at one of her meetings. “Because concrete is heavy, they kill people.”
Over the last year, Garcetti has been campaigning across the city for the mandatory retrofit plan, traipsing, for example, from a town hall meeting in the San Fernando Valley to a meeting with the Chamber of Commerce.
“The first question often in the mouth of stakeholders we meet is: Isn’t this going to cost a lot? And that’s the wrong frame,” Garcetti told the Chamber. “Not doing anything -- isn’t that going to cost more?”
“Remember San Francisco,” Garcetti added. Referring to the great 1906 earthquake, he said it took that city “40 years to rebuild back to the strength of 1906. Los Angeles simply cannot afford to go that way.”
©2015 the Los Angeles Times Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
