Sustainable Cities is a service-learning course offered through the Program on Urban Studies and Earth Systems Program. Students learn and work collaboratively with Bay Area government agencies and community organizations to support their sustainability goals. Now in its sixth year, the class attracts undergraduate and graduate students from a multitude of disciplines, ranging from urban studies to civil and environmental engineering to law and public policy majors, to support clients on meaningful fieldwork-based projects.
The Winter 2015 class worked with five community partners on the following projects: 1) assessing feasibility of an equitable and integrated Bay Area public transportation fare structure - Friends of Caltrain; 2) mapping residential displacement and demographic shifts in San Mateo County - Community Legal Services in East Palo Alto; 3) developing a public engagement strategy for household hazardous waste disposal in the City of San Jose - Department of Environmental Services; 4) creating a toolkit for Women Bike SF to increase bike ridership in San Francisco - San Francisco Bicycle Coalition; 5) providing technical and policy analysis for the City of Oakland soft story retrofit program - Resilient Oakland Initiative. The final presentations took place on March 11, 2015 at Stanford University (Video). Update on Project Activities Having spent the entire week polishing our map, we now have two maps, a combination of which will likely become our final mapping deliverable. The first map we made is a continuation of the map we began last week, overlaying soft story locations with parcel information. In addition to this information we also brought in the vulnerability data from ABAG, creating a grayscale gradient spread over the entire map. Finally, we were able to to find a street map of the City of Oakland that was put underneath the soft-story and vulnerability graphics, enabling us to hide the parcel data. This made the map look much more clean and intuitive, as parcel data includes less intuitive visual information for understanding location (street names, color-coding by land use) and many more simple black lines outlining properties, which overloads the eyes with excess information without giving any real reference. Our second map was created using arcScene, which enabled us to create a map in 3D. We decided to tie the height of the properties to number of units, after discovering that a few information sets detailing the number of stories seemed inaccurate for some locations when compared to street-view pictures of the apartment. Additionally, we overlayed that information with parcel and vulnerability data. Unfortunately, arcScene was not compatible with our street map, making this map slightly harder to read than our 2D one even while containing more relevant information. To solve this problem we plan to include a small 2D map of the region our 3D map is representing as reference. Currently we plan on creating about 4 different 3D/2D maps showcases various regions in Oakland so that policy makers and planners working with the City can see the density of soft story sites in addition to the vulnerability associated with each area. Observations/Insights Last week, we made initial attempts to extract information from available results of the survey being carried City of Oakland. Those results were not much different from the City’s broad summary of statistics, so we tried to come up with more specific questions that included several of the aspects captured by the survey. For instance, we wanted to know what factors were relevant to tenants and owners (separately) for prioritization of buildings in the soft-story retrofit program, in addition to disaggregating responses by the percentage of income spent on rent. From the many results obtained from combining these multiple criteria, we found a few interesting cases, such as the one in the figure below, showing what level of priority (1 being the highest priority, and 5, the lowest) is given to large buildings (dark blue), small buildings (light blue), buildings with low-income tenants (yellow), and buildings with low-income owners (red). The key observation is how a considerable amount of tenants who pay more than 50% of income on rent thought that it was reasonable to prioritize buildings with low-income owners, raising questions such as: are they aware of the current cost-sharing structure for improvements (70% tenant and 30% owner)? This and other questions are being analyzed to be included in our final report in order to bring new elements to the policy-related discussions being held by the City of Oakland, as well as providing feedback for further outreach activities to be implemented. Next Steps With SquareSpace, we are hoping to create an approachable forum for discussion and resources. Although many documents we have created are designed for use by planners, we plan to have dedicated tenant and homeowner tabs detailing the essentials of retrofitting with social media integration. With our presentation, we hope to bring together some of our most major contributions and understand how our individual contributions might be linked. So far, we believe that our work has covered a wide variety of the Oakland Retrofit work, from community outreach to technical models of seismic damage. In the final week, we hope to simplify and condense our current GIS maps for ease of use. The initial 2-dimensional GIS map will be a overlayed heat map, the fully zoomed out view of Oakland. 3 additional maps will focus on specific regions of this master map, zoomed in for a more detailed view of the soft-story homes in the area. Thus far, these 3 regions have been designated as: 1) the area around Lake Merritt, which has a high concentration of soft story homes, 2) The eastern portion of the city, which has few soft stories but covers a large portion of the map, 3) Regions of exceptionally high risk, located further away from Lake Meritt. With our 3D GIS map, we have opted to focus on the number of units. Thus the soft story structures that contain the most units are projected are extruded to quite a height. That way, city planners can, hopefully, with one glance, see not only which areas are most at-risk and concentrated, but also which specific locations should be emphasized when choosing where to allocate public funds. Update on Project Activities This past Thursday we met with David Medeiros at the Geospatial Center and made great strides in finalizing what the mapping aspect of our project will look like. We made a preliminary map – the first of what will in all likelihood be many iterations – that simply layered over a parcel map of Oakland that parcels that were identified as Soft Story. While simple in scale, this was a great experience in familiarizing ourselves with the GIS programs. At the moment, we have much data that we did not yet use in mapping. The sheets that Dana Brechwald sent us are rich in material. However, as Jack noted, we do not as of yet have any data about seismic activity in the region, so we are hoping to find that either via the USGS or potentially Camilo will have a way of acquiring it. Once we have that data, we plan to establish our Vulnerability Metric and generate some kind of heat map detailing which areas are most at risk. And then, by zooming in, one will be able to see which specific parcels are the most vulnerable. We hope to have a fairly finalized map by the end of next week. Apart from the map, this week we continued working on our project’s website. Having chosen SquareSpace due to its wonderfully user-friendly interface, we began experimenting with formatting and design options. Thus far we have created our home-page and a few drop down menus, but are still deciding what information we want to relay and how best to go about doing so. The city of Oakland sent a postcard to each soft story home a few weeks ago in order to provide information and spread awareness to these residents. However, as a group, we believed the postcard to be both too passive and lacking in immediacy, a problem which we hope to ameliorate with our website. Yet it is a fine line we must walk between being alerting the public that they may be living in, as a participant at one of the community meetings put it, “a ticking time bomb” and being alarmist. The content of the website is to be an ongoing question. What We Observed and Learned On Monday we brainstormed about interesting questions that might come up from the preliminary data obtained from the surveys made by the City of Oakland. We expected to be able to find patterns that related socio-economic aspects with people’s preferences and attitudes towards risk, as well as other interesting ways of filtering information beyond the summary provided by our partners. For instance, one question in the survey asked about the level of acceptable damage, or conversely, the level to which people expect the building to comply seismically (this is, whether it will experience minor damage, extensive damage, etc.) and we decided to separate what tenants and owners thought about it. In all cases (tenants, owners, or the whole group), the majority prefers the category “Building will experience damage and disruption to utilities, but no significant damage and it can be occupied during repair”. There were some differences on the percentages, for example showing some 4% of tenants preferring significant damage (vs.less than 2% of owners in that category), which makes sense since, as long as they survive, it is not their investment under risk of loss. However, these numbers are not so directly comparable since very few owners answered the question compared to the number of tenants, which is also an issue on several questions we intended to break down. A simpler question we thought would be interesting to extract from the database was about the outreach strategy that can be associated with those residents that identified themselves as wanting to keep involved and informed about the program (see figure below). It turns out that most individuals who want to stay connected (roughly 80%), were reached by either postcard delivery to their address or the Yahoo-Groups database the City of Oakland had. We found this a bit surprising since the postcard does not bring much information (or we didn’t find it particularly engaging), but it may be too early to draw conclusions since only a limited amount of residents have responded so far. On Thursday we convened at the Geospatial Lab in the Earth Sciences library, to begin generating content for our GIS analysis as well as learning the basics of creating a layered map. With David’s help, we set up a project folder and added two layers of mapping data, very simply showing the parcels of land and the locations of the soft story buildings. We learned about the data already present in the GIS database, and how to clean data tables within GIS to make cross-data comparisons. Next Steps Through our analysis of outreach data we were able to glean a significant amount of initial results that will be useful for our policy recommendations. However, a lot of these results are not all too different from results that could be determined from Victoria’s initial attempts at analysis; the primary difference being that we got results exclusively for landlords and tenants, a broad categorization we deemed particularly relevant. Our next steps at analyzing our data will be to brainstorm questions that probe a little deeper into demographic differences and how that impacts people’s opinions on retrofitting policy. In trying to understand the impact of gentrification/short term housing on willingness to retrofit, we will try and ask how the amount of time you have lived in a unit and plan on living in said unit impact your decision to quickly and efficiently take steps to retrofit. We also want to try and understand how income level impacts both tenants’ and landlords’ willingness to take on costs or how they perceive an equitable distribution of funding (e.g. small vs. large buildings, poor tenants vs. poor landlords). Ultimately, these next few weeks we hope to gain an even more nuanced understanding of how demographics impact people’s engagement with retrofitting, in an attempt to try and recommend policies/incentives that would help the city be more efficient in pushing for retrofitting. This week was the first time we had access to all the data necessary to begin our mapping project. We made good progress, laying out initial location and parcel data to begin the mapping process, but their still remain a few critical steps to go. Our ultimate goal is to overlay the pre-existing vulnerability data provided to us by ABAG on top of our existing map so that we can identify particularly vulnerable soft-story regions. Once this has been done we also plan on creating a few maps that zoom into these vulnerable regions, so policy-makers can see what the density of soft story housing is like there. From the spreadsheet defining the soft-story building descriptions, we realized that we have different potential factors that could lead to fragile structural behaviors. First, the year of construction of the building relates to the kind of wood material the building has. Given that the seismic codes and requirements have evolved and improved with the years, it is evident the direct relation between structural safety and new engineering practices. Second, the wall density (relation between the amount of walls and total constructed area) plays also an important role; there are buildings with only a few walls that make the structure potentially unsafe, and given that we are looking specifically at soft-story buildings, which by definition have some missing walls in the first floor, this parameter is fundamental. Third, the number of stories has a significant impact on the behavior of the soft story buildings because we are expecting damage concentration on the first floor, which is supporting the weight of all the floors above it. Finally, the geometric irregularities (if walls are particularly concentrated in certain places rather than more or less equally distributed along the area of the building) in the buildings could also have a major impact on the building vulnerability. To evaluate the extend at which these parameters play a role in our analysis, we will model some extreme cases using FEM807 (maximum and minimum number of stories, oldest and newest year of construction, etc), which can give us a fair idea of how vulnerable the buildings are. We would like to analyse more buildings but given the time constraints, and limited information about the buildings, this may not be feasible. However, if we are able to find buildings that can clearly be identified as having an extraordinary amount of risk we would like to point those out on our map. Our website, to be made on SquareSpace, will contain a condensed and user-oriented version of the City of Oakland’s existing Soft story page, in which we will add our own analysis and data work for the use of the Oakland Resilience Team. Our policy recommendations, as well as our ArcGIS analysis will remain partitioned from the rest of the content, so that it can be removed by the city of Oakland’s staff, should they want to use the website for outreach. We will also include a section on future work, so that we may describe how future Stanford students may contribute to the City of Oakland’s ongoing work. In Week 7, we continued to develop the online and virtual resources available to Oakland homeowners by continuing to provide information on community meetings and retrofit resources. Based on email correspondence from the Oakland team, we are also in the process of adding more infographics and pictures, translating over information from the website to a condensed, digestible form on the Facebook Page. Another key component of this week’s work was gathering data from the City’s resilience team for analysis. From Tim, the city’s structural engineer and Danielle, the ABAG official, we received survey information on the soft-story buildings surveyed, as well as the exempt buildings. From Sue Piper, the outreach coordinator and Victoria Salinas, the chief resilience officer, we received data on community meetings and preliminary analysis on tenant and landowner information. At the end of this week, we checked in with Victoria by phone to confirm that we had received this information, and to adjust our deliverables to the needs of the Oakland team. We will be, in lieu of a pamphlet, be developing web content to be made available to the public with key information and graphics from outreach materials and original analysis from ABAG’s soft-story surveys.
As a result of our meeting with Tim and Danielle, we became familiar with a database that contains information about the topological characteristics of nearly 2000 soft-story-buildings, such as dimensions of constructed walls, open spaces, number of stories, etc. Our goal is to perform a statistical characterization of these buildings, in order to detect patterns that are repeated for several buildings, so that we can come up with a few of their typical characteristics. The motivation to do this is to be able to select these typical characteristics as an input to the FEMA methodology mentioned below, so as to determine the expected forces that the such a typical building can resist. With this information, we expect to be able to: (1) communicate risk better among residents and owners; and (2) to guide the prioritization process by focusing on those buildings that might be below the average conditions. FEMA: As part of the integral retrofitting project in San Francisco, FEMA launched the FEMA 807 project. FEMA 807 created a report where they established different levels of evaluation to wooden soft-1st-story buildings. The degree of sophistication and refinement in the evaluation is directly related to the amount of details that are needed for the evaluation. Given the kind of data that we have for the typical buildings, we are going to use the most simplified analysis that FEMA 807 proposes to assess the degree of vulnerability that building have. However, we still will have to take some considerations according to the experience of the Building Inspector of Oakland and Stanford Professors that have experience in the structural engineering practice. As far as what methodology will be used, FEMA 807 Chapter 3, will be used. We will get the demand forces on the buildings and compare those with the building strength. The ratio between these parameters could give a good idea of the level vulnerability of buildings. With most of the community meetings being conducted last week, our team now has access to a broad range of data from community stakeholders. From community meetings, Sue Piper, point person on community engagement, gathered together a matrix of major issues (financial, technical, tenant/landlord specific) including tenant and landlord positions on concerns that applied to both. Additionally, she put together a spreadsheet of all the community’s comments organized by meeting, which will allow us to get a better feel for the needs of each distinct neighborhood represented. Finally, the survey Victoria sent out at the beginning of the year received around 300 responses. She sent us the raw data as well as some initial analysis she has performed; mostly bar graphs or pie charts that allow us to see the how people stand on an issue. This data is quantitative and does not give us insight into an individual’s reasoning for responding how they did but should help supplement the more qualitative analysis we will be able to do with feedback from community meetings. Next Steps Based on the survey data, we hope to recommend a number of options that the city can pursue. We have thus far only done a cursory analysis of the survey’s data, but have outlined a few central data points on which we will focus. These are as follows: 1) To what standards would the residents prefer their building upgraded/retrofitted? More substantial upgrades would likely be more expensive. 2) What percentage of take-home pay do residents currently spend on rent? This will determine the impact a mandatory retrofit program would have. 3) How much, in terms of a monthly rent increase, are these seismic retrofits worth to each tenant?4) Would a retrofit equal such a raise in rent that it would not be worth the increased safety? From these initial central points, we have created three overarching questions to arrange our website presentation around. The first is what it the Acceptable Risk for each community. Acceptable risk is the level of risk that is deemed to be tolerable for these communities, as determined by a number of different social, demographic, and economic factors. Similarly, the next question to be asked is what should be the payment split between the owner and tenant when completing a retrofit? At the moment, the 70/30 tenant/owner split could be overly burdensome for many of the tenants in soft story homes. Our third question, again in line with the first two, concerns financial feasibility. If and when the soft story program becomes mandatory, which tenants or homeowners are financial incapable of affording a retrofit, and therefore would need support from the city, or a third party organization. Dana Brechwald, a Resilience Planner with ABAG, sent us the GIS files they used to create their “Communities at Risk in Fragile Housing and Exposed to Hazards” map. Now that we have this data in addition to the City of Oakland’s data about the location of soft story apartment stock we can begin creating our own map, an overlay of the existing ABAG map with pins that designate the location of each soft-story building. This way city planners will be able to get an intuitive picture of the communities that are most at risk in the case of a natural disaster given the density of housing stock and socioeconomic fragility. Hopefully this will help policy makers better decide how to distribute the funds they have available in the most equitable way possible, and maybe even be able to see problems in specific communities that need direct addressing. I. Project Updates
Last Monday and Wednesday, our group commuted to Oakland to assist our community partners in their outreach meetings and meet more of the Resilient Oakland Team. At the Monday community meeting given in English, Gideon and Ryan acted as scribes and participants, brainstorming possible ways to engage under-represented groups as well as design fair retrofitting policies. The community meeting on Monday was attended by 8 community members, all of whom were home owners, and one very vocal man who was a landlord of 60+ units around the city. In speaking with Victoria after the meeting, it became clear that one of the main takeaways was that there might be groups within Oakland that the city has not taken into account yet when designing their retrofit program – most notably, in the meeting, condominium communities. One woman was a member of a condominium, and she was vocal about the difficulties that could be faced when dealing with the prospect of a retrofit needing to be approved by a board. Unfortunately, the community meeting on Wednesday (Spanish) had no attendance. We started discussing reasons for that to be so, and thinking of possible strategies to reach and engage more people. For instance, by publicizing the program at schools and libraries so as to get to adults through their kids, who also happen to be more engaged in social media (another powerful option for outreach) than the average hispanic parent. On the bright side, during that visit to Oakland we had the opportunity to meet with Tim Low (Oakland’s building inspector), as well as Danielle Hutchings and Dana Brechwald from ABAG’s resilience program, at the City of Oakland. Over the course of this week we set up an Oakland Resilience email account and begin subscribing to Yahoo Groups representing various community groups in the City of Oakland. Some groups were for neighborhoods within the city and some were for interest groups; they ranged from 20-800+ members. We estimate that the Resilience team will be able to reach out to around 3000 people through these various groups. While no outreach has been done yet, Sue believed this was an important step in developing connections to pre-existing networks of public stakeholders. In addition to setting up an updated Yahoo Accounts and joining the large number of community groups, we created a Facebook Page for the Oakland Retrofit program, creating one place for all the information that a tenant or landowner might need to retrofit, including links to the Oakland website. Sue Piper sent out the first rendition of the page on Friday, and we will be continuously updated the page with comments from the team. II. What We Observed and Learned The community meeting on Monday was attended by 8 community members, all of whom were home owners, and one very vocal man who was a landlord of 60+ units around the city. In speaking with Victoria after the meeting, it became clear that one of the main takeaways was that there might be groups within Oakland that the city has not taken into account yet when designing their retrofit program – most notably, in the meeting, condominium communities. One woman was a member of a condominium, and she was vocal about the difficulties that could be faced when dealing with the prospect of a retrofit needing to be approved by a board. Overall, the general attitude was amicable. The homeowners truly seemed there to learn and become more informed about the situation. It did not seem like they were using this meetings as simply a platform to air grievances held against the city (although there was one man who was rather bluntly expressing his dislike of rent-control). The only time attitudes shifted into anger was when a slide was shown detailing the proposed aims of a city-wide retrofit program. People became irate at the notion that “severe structural damage” was apparently a satisfactory outcome, in the eyes of the city, for some structures in the event of an earthquake. The city’s rationale was that some structures were in such a sorry condition that anything short of complete collapse in the event of an earthquake would be acceptable. Both Ryan and Gideon agreed that that particular slide should have been defined further or removed, as it brought to focus the lack of set retrofit standards and resulted in confusion and anger. Although our meeting with ABAG and structural engineers Tim, Danielle and Dana on Wednesday was very productive, it also left us with some uncertainty about how our efforts could contribute to the program. Particularly, we learned that ABAG has already worked on some mapping initiatives including census data and seismic shaking, which was part of what we stated as our goal. As Oakland is so close to the Hayward fault, Tim described, the shaking intensity is high and does not vary much throughout the city, thus, making it nearly not useful for prioritization efforts since it would assign virtually the same vulnerability to all locations. Regarding socio-economic data, there was also a limitation due to the fact such information must not be disclosed at the level of households, whereas aggregated measures (such as those from the census) are not specific enough. We hope that some results from the survey being conducted by the City are available soon so that we can gather some information at the level of blocks or buildings. Finally, we realized that the problems ABAG and the City are most concerned about are beyond the scope of our project, namely: an analysis of the cost and associated risk reduction of retrofit strategies at the city level is clearly the most interesting result we could have, but as much as we’d like to work on it, it certainly exceeds our timeline and training. During the meeting we also gathered some data about soft-story buildings (collected from owners) which includes information about materials, open spaces, number of stories and other layout information. With a preliminary analysis we found that 3-story buildings constitute the median, average and mode of soft-story buildings in Oakland, so we might narrow our analysis to that specific archetype. We also will perform additional analysis on this database to detect any other patterns that might be of interest to our partner and communities. III. Critical Analysis & Next Steps Based on our community outreach we have identified some key challenges that face the Oakland Retrofit team. In outreach efforts, it is apparent from the low attendance rates that the Oakland team has not yet been successful at engaging the tenants and landowners of the 22,000 soft story homes; this could be for several reasons, described by a few of the participants in the outreach sessions. One such reason is the notion that there is a mismatch between the risk that the tenants perceive and the risk that the city has discerned through studies. Although the city understands the risks, perhaps these risks are not being communicated effectively to the community members. Owners, on the other hand, we found to be relatively more motivated to commit to the financial costs of retrofitting, and saw retrofits as a means to protect their assets. Another general reason for low attendance could be technical and logistical. There were a few broken links on the city website, making the page with the community meeting times and locations inaccessible. Notice of these meetings, such as the one on Wednesday, was given on relatively short notice, a week before the fact. On the technical assessment side, Camilo and Luis discussed with ABAG and the structural engineers our idea of mapping the relative vulnerability in terms of earthquake measures. As Tim, the structural engineer detailed, a map of vulnerability in terms of earthquake shaking would not necessarily be useful to them, because Oakland’s close proximity to the Hayward fault the whole area essentially at risk, and individual differences in regions would not be consequential. Moving forward, we would like to shift our focus from providing new information and analysis to communicating the specific risks of earthquake damage to community members with GIS maps and diagrams of the structural damage. This is feasible, given that the variability of the soft-story homes is low: most soft-story homes are 3-story and follow a very similar layout. With the assistance of Tim, the structural engineer for the project, we hope to deliver an informational pamphlet that will engage tenants and hopefully motivate retrofitting. To achieve this, we hope to classify the soft-story buildings not by earthquake risk but by categorizing structural type, based on factors such as the ratio of concrete to open space on the ground floor and the number of stories. This pamphlet, as we envision it now, will include a pictorial, schematic model of the most probable damage that will occur to each of the three structural categories, and list out the potential damages as well as potentially list out costs of repair. With GIS, we might also be able to create a map of Oakland that links regions of soft story homes to their most common structural type. With this pamphlet, we envision that a landowner can identify where in Oakland they reside, and use the related picture to identify specifically what a most probable earthquake might do to the structure of their building. We will vet this idea with our community partners through the following weeks and shape the idea with input from the Resilient Oakland team. |
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