Update on Project Activities
We arranged phone calls with Timothy Low, Oakland's building inspector, and Danielle Hutchings, ABAG's resilience coordinator. We started by letting them know our vision of the project and our intention to come up with vulnerability or risk-engineering factors that might be interesting to consider and to bring into our mapping efforts. Although they viewed it as an interesting idea – and said they thought our project would certainly be worthwhile and useful for them to have – they are more concerned with a more immediate question of which buildings should be exempt from the retrofit program and whether current exempt buildings comply with such criteria. Tim mentioned a database that includes addresses and key characteristics of about 300 exempt buildings, as well as pdf’s with more specific building information. On this call we had a green light to visit Oakland, get some of the documentation we might need, and possibly have a driving tour to identify features of exempt buildings. A highlight from our conversation with Tim and Danielle is that their interest in surveying exempt buildings might modify the orientation of our project in a direction in which policy recommendation based on holistic vulnerability metrics becomes less of a priority. The analysis of exempt buildings is, however, quite complicated since not much data is available. Tim and Danielle’s suggestion was for us to do some analysis on an average building, instead of one by one, and evaluate the pertinence of exemption measures. After class on Monday, Ryan spoke with Professor Chan about how best to approach the community meetings we will attending in the coming week. Professor Chan advised that we closely mediate “air-time,” or the amount of time each community members has to speak, as well as minimize community group size to an ideal 4 or 5 individuals. In addition, Professor Chan recommended that we encourage generative ideas instead of critical comments, and take careful field notes immediately following the meeting detailing our observations about community demographics, attitudes, and common comments. What We Observed and Learned After our multiple meetings with the Oakland Retrofit team, we believe we have a more comprehensive understanding of the Oakland Team’s approach to outreach and retrofit analysis, as well as a better understanding of how we might effectively contribute. In one such meeting, Sue Piper, the community coordinator, detailed how outreach for the project was primarily conducted with physical material, such as flyers and informational mailers, rather than virtually, with social media. She suggested to us that we try to improve their virtual media approach by rebranding and revamping their Yahoo groups page as well as potentially creating a Facebook page for the Oakland Retrofit Project. During our community meetings next Monday and Wednesday, we will be determining the best way to contact both the community represented at the community meetings and the communities not represented. In a later conversation with Tim and Danielle, we learned that the engineering and structural team on the Oakland project was in the process of re-evaluating soft-story buildings which were previously exempt. Although we previously knew of this effort, they gave us key background on how these buildings were initially exempted; through engineering evaluations to the ambiguous standards available at the time. With Tim and Danielle’s input, we collectively agreed that we would focus on using available models of typical soft-story houses to prioritize the vulnerability of the exempt locations, and that this would be a critical aspect of our GIS analysis. Critical Analysis/Next Steps Our most tangible next step is attending two community meetings in the next week. On Monday, Ryan and Gideon will be going up to assist and facilitate discussion at the first of these meetings, while on Wednesday Camilo and Luis – our resident Spanish speakers – will be doing the same at the Spanish-language meeting. The purpose of these meetings is to determine what aspects of the program are most concerning for the general public, and what aspects seem easiest to accomplish. Also, we are eagerly looking forward to putting faces and stories to the numbers that we have thus far been analyzing, and shifting our perspective to a more human-centered one. On Wednesday Camilo and Luis (and potentially Ryan and Gideon as well) will also be meeting in person with Tim Low and Danielle Mieler. The purpose of that meeting is to pick up the large amount of data the city has thus far collected regarding the 300 or so soft story buildings that were exempted for retrofitting. Danielle wished for us to comb through those exemptions and see which ones were “soft” exemptions (i.e. exempt because of number of units, not in high-risk seismic area, etc.) or “hard” exemptions (properties that were for some reason or another exempted by an engineer). In conjunction with this outreach work, we also plan on beginning our mapping project. First we will try and compile a list of all relevant engineering and demographic data relating to soft-story vulnerability. This will include USGS earthquake hazard data, Oakland’s open source data about soft-story location and Census information; all information we currently have at our disposal. Additionally, through our meeting with Tim we plan to get more in depth information about individual building’s seismic vulnerability as well as a spreadsheet from Danielle containing general information about the 1300 or so soft-story buildings they surveyed in 2008-2009. From here we will set up a meeting with David Medeiros to begin workshopping our mapping project. In this meeting we hope to get a spread of soft-story locations on our initial map and talk about how to input additional information based on a formula for vulnerability we plan on deriving. This vulnerability metric will describe vulnerability in terms of physical and social risk, but will need to be feasibly calculated using data we already have or plan on getting in the next few weeks. A meeting with some professors of Earthquake Engineering here at Stanford may help us determine the best way to create this formula. Our final idea for this week is to begin brainstorming how best to deal with buildings that were given exemptions from soft-story classification during the initial survey. First, we plan on organizing these projects by reason for exemption. Through this we will be able to eliminate buildings that don’t fit within the project scope (i.e. buildings with 1-5 units). The biggest issue the city currently has with regards to exempt buildings is a suspicion that privately conducted analyses may not have been comprehensive enough to determine if the building is truly soft-story or not. Because of this, our next step will be to determine what standard these buildings will need to be measured by. There are a variety of federal, state and local standards for soft-story buildings, so we plan on coordinating with Tim and Danielle to determine which one applies best for the current situation in Oakland. Our next steps for this aspect of the project are a little uncertain; a professional analysis will likely be needed, which is not really feasible for our group to accomplish given our abilities and limited time frame. And so, after our conversations this week, we feel as if our group’s focus has shifted slightly. We felt that Tim and Danielle had a definite idea for where our group could be very helpful, and we want to help them realize those ideas. We believe that after this coming week we will have completely nailed down what our project will entail. The meetings with the community and with Tim and Danielle will solidify both what they would most like us to help them with and what we are most interested in. This week will probably be the most formative one we have had thus far, and we are looking forward to it. This week our class reached an exciting milestone where each team presented their project scope of work developed in collaboration with community partners. Each team described the background information for the project, their detailed plan for outreach and data collection, as well as the broader significance of the project within the context of Bay Area sustainability. From here on out, we plan to delve deeper into our projects and dive right into fieldwork! I. Update on Project Activities This week our team worked with Victoria on the ongoing community outreach program for the Oakland Retrofit program. More specifically, we provided our input on the initial survey to be sent out by the City of Oakland to tenants, landowners, real estate professionals. This survey data would provide the critical demographic background that the city would need to make decisions on financial policy, especially the implementation of financial support and incentives. Generally speaking, we suggested that the survey ask participants to describe what policies and practices would be fair instead of asking what would be best for them individually, and explaining in more detail the city’s rationale for incentivizing certain areas or buildings over other areas or building types. If this survey data is made available to us, and occurs within the timeframe of our project, we hope to use this demographic data to create comprehensive ArcGIS maps that would allow the city of Oakland to visualize areas of potential focus. Also this week, we searched for preliminary data to input into a potential map of Oakland, which is described in further detail below. II: What We Learned We have begun to focus our attention on what will be a large part of our final deliverable: the survey. Working on the survey will help us define our scope of the project, because we will become familiar not only with how our project will impact residents, but also who those residents really are. We realized during a group meeting on Wednesday that it may not be realistic to find out specific data for each tenant, but we are confident that homeowner data will be available, and have begun preliminary searches for said data. In the coming week, we will reach out to Victoria and the Building and Housing Manager in hopes to find what we need. The best way to represent the data we acquire from the survey will be through a layered GIS map, one complete with – ideally – house-by-house socioeconomic information. After our exposure to the ArcGIS tool, we have decided to create a map visualizing the “vulnerability” of certain at-risk areas of Oakland. We will finalize in the coming week how to best create this metric of vulnerability with which we will assess the city. It is vital to first have the survey data before moving forward with any policy recommendations so that we may prioritize areas of current policy that need overhaul. These areas will most likely include things like finances, wherein the city ought to consider reworking the 70/30 cost split between the owners and tenants in order to better reflect the income levels of a given household; or community outreach in a language that is spoken in that home. III: Next Steps Moving forward, our team is looking forward to getting more involved with City of Oakland officials working on the project. Victoria is planning on putting us into contact with these officials, after which we plan on scheduling a Skype conference call to discuss our preliminary project scope and deliverables. Camilo has kindly created a decision tree of our project process which encompasses the scope, as well as a graphic listing deliverables at all project phases. Of particular importance for our team are the ArcGIS maps we plan on creating as well as an outreach pamphlet comprised of these maps, information about soft-story risk, and resources available to them (as tenants or landlords) presented in an easy-to-understand and digest format. We hope that our map will be able layer together soft-story building information, seismic shaking risk, regions of liquefaction, class/ethnic distribution by neighborhood and information collected from the survey being currently prepared (should the information be made available soon enough). If these layers prove to dense, we plan on brainstorming a specific metric encompassing these factor that can measure vulnerability (an inability to recover from soft-story collapse) that can be applied graphically. In order to figure this out we have set up a meeting with David Medeiros, Stanford’s geospatial instructor and reference specialist, for next week to talk through some of our initial ideas and determine what actually is feasible given our experience and time-frame. Further down the pipeline, our group plans on attending some community outreach meetings. Before that we plan on thinking of some questions to ask members of the community who attend; currently our only idea is for feedback on our vulnerability metric but more will surely pop up as we became more engaged with others who are working on the project and have unique perspectives and experiences. I: Update on Project Activities
In our meeting with her last Monday, Victoria Salinas described many critical factors to take into account when implementing a retrofit strategy for Oakland. For example, while requiring the mandatory retrofit for most affected areas would be the most effective strategy from a technical point of view, the subsequent increase in housing cost would decrease the affordability of housing, especially detrimental given the low income status of the residents in the affected areas. Victoria also described where her agency was currently acting in the retrofit process. With funds from the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) and the government Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), her agency was beginning a pilot program to effectively allocate the $2.5 million total for a targeted retrofit program. First in the retrofit pilot program was the survey and demographic analysis of tenants, as although landowners were surveyed in 2009, the city has little background on the tenant demographics. Our first role in the project, Victoria suggested, would be to evaluate this survey and their current survey methods for collecting this demographic tenant information. II: What We Observed and Learned From our conversation with Victoria and the readings provided, a picture of the issues at hand emerged. Soft story buildings are frequently apartments with a number of separate living units. In a survey conducted by the City of Oakland in conjunction with ABAG, inspectors were able to identify about 1,100 soft story buildings, containing 19,000 rental units. Considering an average of 2-3 people per unit, that amounts to around 45,000 people at risk for the next big earthquake. Additionally, these buildings frequently offer affordable housing options to disadvantaged members of the community. Although only 11% of the housing stock in the city, ABAG estimates that soft-story buildings could comprise around 67% of units lost during an earthquake. What this means is that during an earthquake event, the disadvantaged are poised to be disproportionately impacted. Those in lower income brackets are less able to sustain themselves during the rebuilding phase post-earthquake, and may be forced to migrate to an area with more affordable housing (Antioch, Stockton, suburbs of the Central Valley) to make ends meet. Oakland is a city with a huge amount of cultural heritage. This is due in large part to the intermingling of religious, ethnic and socioeconomic groups, which all bring a unique perspective to view the city from. A major disaster could cause these societal bonds to become more fragile, as well as promote a more gentrified city (as developers target damaged properties, they may be prone to build condos or similar properties that generate a larger return on investment). In order to keep Oakland's heritage alive, an attempt must be made to create communities that are resilient, able to survive and thrive in tough conditions. This is why the City of Oakland is promoting a retrofit program, and is what motivates our team to come up with a solution that promotes equity and targets the most vulnerable. III: Critical Analysis/Next Steps Moving forward, our group has decided to focus on what we identified as three key areas: 1. Economic feasibility 2. Identifying the buildings on which we want to focus, and 3. Community outreach We believe one of the main areas we can help Victoria is by examining the financial framework through which most of these retrofits will occur. San Francisco conducted a similar program, Community Action Seismic Safety Plan (CAPPS) in which the city partnered with Deutsche Bank to provide affordable loans to tenants and landlords of buildings that were improved upon. An Oakland tenant currently pays 70% of capital improvement cost while the landlord pays the remaining 30%. We are planning on discussing with Victoria exactly how fixed that 70/30 split is and if there is potential to rework those numbers on a case-by-case basis. This way, we could ensure that lower-income tenants would not be prohibitively burdened by cost of retrofitting. We discussed how a potential Retrofit Strategy would be useful in minimizing the cost of the retrofits. Given that the building taxonomy in Oakland is likely to show that buildings can have similar structural characteristics and configurations, it would be very efficient and practical to identify some typical retrofitting schemes that could reduce the seismic vulnerability of multiple buildings. Considering that perspective, simple and economical retrofitting strategies could be presented, such that the retrofitting costs would be roughly calculated and general financial decisions could be taken. The City of Oakland has already conducted a preliminary survey of potential soft story houses, and has identified 1,400 houses as being soft story. Oakland, as well as being in an area of high seismic activity, also has a large percentage of area that the USGS has identified as having a 73% chance of liquefaction in case of an earthquake of magnitude 7.1 or greater. While we do not know the exact numbers, there is a high chance a good number of those 1,400 soft story houses also fall in a liquefaction area. If this is the case, and factoring in the limited funds available, it may be smarter to ensure that the houses the program focuses on are ones that would definitely be preserved. The third goal our group outlined was to make a big push for community engagement with the issue. There has already been a flyer sent out to all the soft story homes, outlining the problem, but it was written in English. There was a small amount of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Spanish on the flyer but we think it may be better to print whole flyers in each language and distribute those accordingly. By building awareness about the pertinence of the problem, the community will react accordingly and retrofits would become common practice in all homes necessitating one. Additionally, we plan on reaching out to community organizers and attending community meetings to better understand the needs of tenants and landlords alike. |
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