Seattle Public Schools spent $260,000 on a seismic overhaul of Lowell Elementary

This time around, something might actually happen in Seattle’s 40-year quest to shore up unreinforced masonry buildings. A City Council resolution approved in December could finally lead to some budgetary heft behind the idea of retrofitting the buildings to modern safety standards. The action is likely to one day lead to mandatory retrofits of such buildings. Though there is no defined timeline for when a mandate might happen, the earliest possibility is still years away.

The effort is critical for Capitol Hill and the Central District. CHS analysis shows some 211 area properties in the city’s “unreinforced masonry” database. Of those, 49 are considered either critical or high risk and only nine of those have either been substantially altered or retrofitted. 17 have been permitted for the expensive retrofitting construction. CHS has reported on work done to protect some of them including E Mercer’s Lowell Elementary School.

Among other plans, the resolution calls for Mayor Bruce Harrell to add spending to ramp up staff in the city’s Department of Construction and Inspections, which could finally get things moving.

“While I’m not excited about a future earthquake, I am excited to get this program going,” said Nathan Torgelson, director of the department during a meeting of the city council’s Public Safety and Human Services Committee.

The plans laid out by the resolution call for first defining and categorizing these buildings. Some of that work has been done, as the city has been tracking the buildings for years. It has identified more than 1,100 unreinforced masonry buildings across Seattle. Of these, 75 are a critical risk, according to a presentation given by Yolanda Ho of the city council staff at the Dec. 9 meeting. Another 184 are considered high risk, while the remainder are a medium risk.

The whole situation is not quite as simple as requiring property owners to foot the bill and then assessing a fine if they don’t. For one, fines don’t actually fix the problem. Additionally, if landlords have to raise rents to help pay for the upgrades, it could wind up displacing existing tenants. And since many such buildings are clustered in less affluent parts of town that would likely exacerbate gentrification in those areas.

Once they’ve pinned down just which buildings fall in the category, the city would then figure out standards for how the various buildings should be reinforced. At some point, they will likely adopt a timeline for compliance, and some strategy for enforcing the standards. Torgelson mentioned possible 7-, 10- and 13-year timeframes for mandating the retrofits. He was quick to add those are simply possibilities, and no decisions have been made yet.

“We’re not going to put mandatory standards in place next year,” he said.

The resolution also calls on the city to help identify possible funding sources or other financial incentives to help building owners pay for the upgrades.

The city departments in charge of the program will then need to make quarterly progress reports to the council, starting in August 2022.

Primarily built prior to 1950, the buildings are made of brick or clay, and were constructed in a way that neither the floors nor the roof or any parapets were secured to the walls of the building. The largest concentrations of them are on Capitol Hill, in Pioneer Square and the International District.

Around Capitol Hill and the Central District, the highest risk buildings identified by the city include the 1928-built, six-story St. Ingbert Apartments on E Howell, and the 1910-built Ben Lomond Apartments on Bellevue Ct E. The city says the Ben Lomond property was issued a retrofit permit. Other clusters of remaining brick buildings around Capitol Hill can be found near the overhauled Harvard Exit theater building on northern Broadway and a swath still standing in Pike/Pine. The Volunteer Park Water Tower is also identified as a risk but has undergone substantial alterations over the year. CHS reported here on recent work to upgrade the tower.

For day-to-day purposes, the buildings hold up well and people are free to jump up and down as long as their downstairs neighbor can tolerate it. But in a major earthquake, such buildings can be a serious risk of collapse without modern retrofitting. And the danger is not only to people in or near these buildings, but also they could fall across roadways, blocking emergency vehicles from accessing some parts of the city.

CHS reported here on how some of Capitol Hill’s greatest old buildings stand up, with elegance, to earthquakes.

Recognizing that a major quake is a not-if-but-when scenario, the city began struggling with what to do about the buildings in the 1970’s, according Ho. Ho said the city council at the time had adopted standards mandating that such buildings be retrofitted to help strengthen them.

However, those standards were repealed shortly after, because such retrofits are pretty expensive, and would have placed too large a burden on building owners.

Ho went on to describe the city continuing to consider the issue in fits in starts. In 20008, a technical committee suggested standards for how to retrofit, but a policy committee could not land on a way to pay for it.

Things started picking up steam again in 2017 with more study of the issue. The group then estimated that the cost of retrofitting all known unreinforced masonry buildings in Seattle would cost roughly $1.28 billion. Many of the buildings are privately owned. However, there are some owned by the city. Additionally, some are owned by the school district or other public entities.

(Quick civics lesson: The city and the school district are separate and distinct, each with its own budget, elected representatives and taxing authority. So if the city were to impose such standards, it would impose a cost on the school district, but the city would not be on the hook to pay for it. The city would, of course, have to pay to upgrade its own buildings. The council resolution specifically calls on the city to work with the schools as this program goes forward.)

The 2017 study kind of simmered for a while, though some changes at the state and county level started a program which might help these retrofits get going. Now we’re at a point where maybe, just maybe, the city will develop a workable model.

If we do, it could end up as a model for other cities along the west coast. Portland and San Francisco in particular have been struggling with the same issue, said Curry Mayer, director of the Department of Emergency Management, also speaking at the December council meeting.

The resolution was approved by the council and signed by then-Mayor Jenny Durkan in December. The next steps will be allocating funding for staffing to develop and administer the program. A spokesperson for Mayor Bruce Harrell said the new administration has not yet had time to study the resolution and so could not comment on it.

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