With the threat of “The Big One” looming, why is much of San Francisco’s affordable housing being developed in earthquake hazard zones?
In July, Mayor London Breed broke ground on Treasure Island’s second affordable housing project, Star View Court, which will include 138 units upon completion. Yet looming over it is the cloud of a possible natural disaster.
And none of that is a coincidence, says Corey Smith, executive director of the Housing Action Coalition. Those large developments include multi-unit market-rate buildings as well as new affordable housing within them — now mandated by the Inclusionary Affordable Housing Program. This program requires new residential projects with more than 10 units to pay an “Affordable Housing Fee” or offer a percentage of the units at “below market rate.”
San Francisco is expected to experience a high caliber earthquake in the coming decades — related to one of two nearby fault lines, the Hayward Fault and the San Andreas Fault. OneSF, the city’s office of resilience and capital planning, which works to plan and fund programs to strengthen the city’s infrastructure, predicts that “there is a 72% probability of one or more 6.7 earthquakes from 2014 to 2043 in the San Francisco Bay Region.
The sf.gov page dedicated to the program states that the report found that an earthquake scenario would “devastate the City’s housing stock, and could have long-term implications on the City’s affordability to middle- and low-income residents, who would be displaced for years. Hundreds of people could be killed and thousands could be injured.”
Beyond just maps, mitigation programs work to undercut risks. A pre-development plan for the Star View Court, for example, outlines the “geotechnical improvement program” that Treasure Island is implementing. The plan includes tactics such as “improvement of island perimeter,” “vibratory compaction” and “surcharging.” Vibratory compaction will work to strengthen the soil’s integrity, while surcharging applies a lateral pressure to soil areas to further compact the earth.
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