Problem to Policy: Linking Hazard and Residential Building Data to Policy Decisions

The 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake and the 1991 East Bay Hills Firestorm had roughly the same order of magnitude impacts on the City of Oakland, California. The long-term recovery aspects of the two disasters, however, were not similar; the earthquake damaged more apartments for more low-income residents, while the fire destroyed homes in the hills of more wealthy residents. Starting in 1992, the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), the regional planning agency for the San Francisco Bay Area, began to make projections of impacts of earthquakes on housing. These projections, based on a variety of existing data and statistical inventories, predict over 150,000 uninhabitable housing units, 350,000 people forced from their homes, and over 100,000 people requiring publicly-provided shelter in a major earthquake on the San Andreas or Hayward fault. Despite the severity of this risk, it has taken 15 years for that general earthquake-impact information to be converted to policy. Part of the delay has been related to data on inventories of different types of residential building construction, including building a consensus on what to inventory and the accuracy of the resulting list. Part of the delay has been developing a consensus on the expected damage to and relative hazard of mobile homes, single-family homes with cripple-wall problems, and potential soft-story multifamily buildings. Other delays have been related to competing priorities on city staff and elected official priorities. Yet from 2006–2009 there has been a major change in the attitude toward housing and its impacts on recovery, as well as an acceleration in housing mitigation policies. It can be argued that one of the major sources of this change has been the impact of housing damage in the Northridge and Kobe Earthquakes, and, most recently, after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. This paper discusses the history of this transformation, as well as ideas on how to convert the experience into change for other types of existing buildings and in other areas.