project sponsor, you have two minutes. i'll be quick. the simple idea is that when i stamped in my heels at five feet back, i can still see in the bedroom window and i don't think that's going to solve that. that's the concern basically that we have. we played the sectional game back and forth to retrieve the edge of the deck and make the edge of the deck solid. and somebody who is shorter than i am is perfectly cut off at the five foot length. somebody who is as tall as i am or taller has a straight shot. and i think there's just a simple question of what is a reasonable approach to this, what is the intent of the planning code to allow this kind of habitation of an otherwise unused flat roof area. and that's all i have to offer. thank you. >> thank you.

okay, the public hearing portion is closed. commissioner sugaya. >> yes, it's a difficult case, i think, for the commission because you kind of have to say on the one hand if you just look at what the architect's presented as just land use issues, or setback issues or residential design guideline issues, or whatever, then it probably isn't extraordinary. but there seem to be other circumstances that we're always faced with. so, on the one hand, i think as a bedroom, since it's off the bedroom and if we assume that the project sponsor is going to live there for quite a long period of time and he's old enough that he's not going to

grow very much taller, he's, you know, the five foot setback would probably work. i don't know which lady in the back is your wife, but i assume she's not any taller than you are. so, from one standpoint you could argue that five feet might work in this case and still have enough livability on the deck. and i suppose -- and i don't know where to go with it exactly, but one idea might be to have -- although you may not want to go to the extent of spending the money for it, but you could have the roof deck as a deck and only pull the railing back five feet. and then at some future date -- and i'm trying to be sensitive

here. at some future date, either the if this owner leaves, you're not going to sell your house since you've been there for 30 years. there might be a time in the future when there could be some extension or something like that. but that's neither here nor there. i don't know where to go with it actually. i'd like to hear more discussion among the commissioners. >> commissioner antonini. >> well, i have some thoughts on this. i don't really care what the relative size is if the deck is relative to the other decks in the area. it's whatever is suiting the project sponsor. it looks like -- i'm not sure if this is 25 by 10. it looks like it probably runs the width of the house almost, and then i would assume it's about -- our project architect,

is it 10 foot -- >> yeah, 25 by 12. >> please come to the podium. >> yeah, just tell me what the dimensions are. the setback from both -- the setback from one side property line approximately 4-1/2 to 5 feet. and the adjacent space happens to be above the street which is the series of steps, which is also one of the reasons why we can have the deck up against that property line and it's open to the public. >> right. what are the dimensions? it's probably in our paperwork. i believe it's 20 by -- >> [speaker not understood]. >> okay, thank you. the point is the 12 because i was thinking 25 by 10, but now, you know, because as you start to pull the thing back, particularly five feet, you start getting into a really small situation. your distance from the house, if you want to put a picnic table there, you want people sitting around it, you've got to have room for the table,

room for the chairs. and, so, you know, it makes it difficult to have enough room to maneuver around there. it's not impossible, but it makes it less desirable. we've got 45 -- 43-1/2 feet of separation as was mentioned between the house, the d-r requestor's house and the location on the deck. even detached homes in san francisco frequently have -- if they're lucky -- three-foot separations. in the case of my house, which is in a detached neighborhood on the west side, three foot on each side. so, if i've in one of the rooms looking south, my neighbor is in her bedroom there, we have the windows open and mine are open, and we can see each other. i mean, it comes with urban living, but this is an extremely long area there. so, i don't know that the idea or the solution of the fence i don't think is a good one because it's only going to cut the light and air to the bedroom in question of the d-r

requestor. probably you want to get as much light and air in there. so, i don't see that as being a solution. but i'm not really sure that we need to cut a lot of size off of here. we have had situations often with our decks where we don't bring the railing all the way to the very end of the deck. it is -- i would entertain the possibility of recessing it a foot or, you know, two feet at the most away from there which still leaves you 10 feet. and that's enough room to maneuver around the table from the house to the side of the deck. >> commissioner moore. >> since this particular deck is off a bedroom, i think the possibility of having a dining room table with people sitting around the table is somewhat limited, although people might do it. i think i generally favor decks to not be flush with the

building wall for reasons, one, outside elevation, but also for reasons of [speaker not understood] the devil is in the details on that particular thing because not very -- if you have a solid [speaker not understood], do a good detail on the railing, it's not the easiest [speaker not understood]. i would be prepared to pull the deck two feet back and have that be a compromise. we do have a substantial separation, though, 45 feet plus a grade to front which by itself is a combination of the vertical as well as the slope distance, which makes it somewhat unlikely somebody to stand at the edge and intentionally stare down, that's not how life works. there is a sensitivity to the health of the neighbors. i'm sure the neighbors will not send their guests or themselves to the edge in order to stare

down there. having said that, i would be comfortable of taking d-r and asking for a two-foot setback off the deck to a 10 by 21.5 and leave it with that. >> is that a motion? >> it is a motion, yes. >> second. >> commissioner hillis? call the question. >> on that motion to take d-r and approve the project setting back the deck's depth by two feet, reducing the deck's depth 2 feet to 10 feet, on that motion, commissioner antonini? >> i'm sorry, i'm not sure if it's 10 feet or 10.5. >> 10 feet. >> is that correct -- >> i was pulling it back by two feet, that's correct. >> i think it was testified that the depth was 12.5. >> 12 and 12, 12 and 1 inch. >> 10 foot 1 inch, close enough. >> reducing the depth of the

deck by 2 feet. on that motion, commissioner antonini? >> aye. >> commissioner borden? >> aye. >> commissioner hillis? >> aye. >> commissioner moore? >> aye. >> commissioner sugaya? >> no. >> and commission president -- excuse me, commission chair wu? >> aye. >> so moved, commissioners, that motion passes by a vote of 5 to 1 with commissioner sugaya voting against. commissioners, that will place you on public comment. i have no speaker cards. >> is there any general public comment? okay. seeing none, meeting is adjourned. [adjourned]

>> hi, i'm lawrence corn field with the department of building inspection and we would like to welcome you to a discussion about policy issues related to earthquakes and earthquake building issues in san francisco. this is all part of the earthquake centennial week where we are commemorating the great events of 1906 anticipate the rebuilding of the city. we've talked a lot about technical issues, where things shook and how things performed. but the issues related to policies, what should we be preparing to do and how strong buildings should be are issues we need to try to focus on. today we have a really great panel. we have lorie johnson, who'sa

planner, and a member of the earthquake engineering research institute board of directors and recent author of this great book, planning for the unexpected that talks about risk. a really great book published by the apa booklet and recommend all your planning. people should look at especially the firstñi chapters. gabriel metcalf , the director of spur, the san francisco urban -- >> say it again. >> san francisco planning and urban research association. >> association. i always want to say league. thanks for coming, gabriel. deborah walker, the president of the building inspection commission and artist and as we know, building inspection is not a technical issue. primarily it's a policy issue at the commission level, helping to direct how strong, how safe, how confident should people be in the work we do. these are policy issues and so i

think having someone who is nontechnical, to some extent, as the president of the commission is a breath of fresh air for many of us. pat buscovich is a structural engineer, the technical side of the table. >> at this end of the table. >> that end of the table. he's worked on more unreenforced building in san francisco than anyone else and formally on the stat name.

thanks for coming, pat. so public policy issues. i was reading last week this really interesting article that i cut out of earthquake spectra and it is by richard selsi and mary (inaudible). ice individual's perceptions of earthquake risks. it says, that people -- all results indicate that individuals tend to ñi per septually underestimate. earthquake events are generally overestimated relative to experienced magazine any -- mag

tiewdz. you have a benchmark you can tie it to. >> lorie, do you think people underestimate the risk for earth quaiks? >> absolutely. it's interesting having been raised in a place like texas wherever year you're thinking about or -- tornado hazards and where you should go inside your howtion. there's a reminder every year and there's a tornado touch down somewhere. it's very difficult with earthquakes. very few families actually have done their home preparedness kits, have stored water and foot, are in a position to really know what the vullener

abilities are of their structures, where we work and how we commute to anticipate from our homes and businesses. these are the things ton earthquake side we don't think of them the way we would other types of risks that are more common. >> you said an interesting point. they don't know their vulnerable areas are. >> yeah, people have a sense of responsibility around other types of natural disasters like fluids, hurricanes and or tornas dose it's not the same thing with earth quaiks.

it's a feeling of the government will take care of it. >> they wouldn't letes be in the building -- >> that's far prosecute the truth, the building department doesn't regulate existing buildings. >> most people say the city's taking care of my safety it's a complicated -- >> if my building was inspected when it's built, it's probably safe. >> especially around earthquakes. i apologize for my voice, i have a cold. those people in san francisco experienced prior to an earthquake, they have in mind this is a barometer for a lot of people and except in specific areas, most people were just affected by power shortages and what no. so when we start talking about a larger magnitude quake, people have no clue what that means to

them. my building didn't collapse therefore it's not going to. so they don't prepare. i think that the larger earth quaiks we've we've akes we've st highlight it is portion of people knowing and it does rest on officials in the building department, but also in emergency services to sort of anticipate that. i think the job is a pr job, or, you know, publicizing and getting information out to the public. i think that's part of what our job is as, you know, commissioners or spur does that well of educating folks. >> there's also a perception that the big earthquake only happens every 500 years and probability of me being around during that 500 year event is low. the earthquake what the engineering community is concerned about is the magnitude

7 on the hayward fault. >> right. >> and you can talk to just about any geologist or geotech any kal engineer and they will assure you 99 percent of the population that exists right now are going to feel that magnitude 7 earthquake. and while it will be def stating to the east bay, because they're built on top of it, it will also be devastating to san francisco, particularly the eastern side, and in '06 we were the center of the bay area and the world. when the hayward fault goes offt east bay will be extremely badly damaged and san francisco will be badly damaged, particularly field areas of the marina, embarcadero south of market, mission creek. >> these are all the places that were damaged last time are going to be damaged next time is that

more or less the theory? >> i wasn't around in 06 but i can't tell you. i was around with you in '89. >> that's right. >> and as prepared for the '06 centennial i've been doing backtracking to the damage patterns in 06 and the correlation is not 100 percent, but it's extremely high that in '06 the heavily damaged areas were field ground and in '89 the heavily damaged areas again were the marina south of market and boluxem street where four people died. mission creek where on shot well the exact style of houses tilted over. >> so the soil type and building type work together -- >> yeah. now in 0 h. #- '6 there were areas not on fill that didn't suffer damage. now in terms of earthquake

damage, you can see there's a correlation that is so large in terms of the soil conditions between '06 and '89 when you have the next earthquake go off on the hayward fault, those same areas are going to be heavily damaged. >> is the area that people say is a potential damage out in richmond and sunset which was not built up in 1906 and is now hifly built up and more susceptible to damage prosecute the san andresa and not the hayward fault? >> yeah. if you look at the statistics the hayward fault is so overdue probably a 30 or 40 percent chance in the next few years whereas the san andreas, the grounds shaking that came out of the report was around 50 to

60 percent of gravity. to give people an idea, '89, most of san francisco was 9. so to think that your house would shake five times harder is kind of the concept that it's hard to grasp that level of shaking. >> so i guess getting back to the issue what the public believes, public believes that their houses are safe enough or they would not be allowed to be in them in some cases, many cases. if i talk to my neighbors, that's what they say. it's been here we've gone through the other earthquake. are the public exceptions reasonable -- expectations reasonable and if not whose job is it to help them expectations of who to help them form risks, graib umbrella? >> i'll jump in. san francisco is a crazy place to put a city if you were going to be planning one, and that's

okay. we -- we know what we should be doing to make it as safe as reasonably possible. i think the lessons of katrina are making a lot of us realize that that's really the better analogy of who we're faced with, that the city could be really destroyed. we could be losing tense of thousands of housing units which will almost all be the rent controlled stock and we could be losing, you know, bridges leading into townt bart tube and therefore the ability of anybody to get to work. and therefore zroig the economy. and it's absolutely clear the federal government is not going to be in a position to do anything to save a city. the federal government has been

willing to let new orleans die and it would be willing to let san francisco diaz well. it is up to us to take the steps necessary to prevent that kind of disaster and recover from it after it happens. the department of building inspection has a special responsibility to take steps to make sure privately owned buildings are upgraded. that's only a piece of this, so they're also publicly owned buildings. but the big question, i think we have just started to think about, is infrastructure. what we do about the water supply and sewer lines and the roads and the. >> power lines. >> the subways, the spawr lines. those life support networks for the city are vulnerable is not more than the buildings. we have our work cut out for us

and dbi has their work cut out as well, although dbi is only responsible for a piece of the work that lies before us. >> right. it's interesting to note that the earth -- and gabriel and i met about this how earthquakes can be divided into daly pieces, how you mitigate the potential hazard before the earthquake and how you respond to the emergency, for whatever period that is, weight, ten weeks, a couple months, and how you recover prosecute the earthquake. a lot of our attention is, of course, focused on how we respond. we want to make sure we're effective. >> eight week window. >> eight week window. it's critical. even though it's short, it's a trying time for everyone. this long hazard period leading up to it is where we're starting to focus on hazard mitigation

which is how are we going to get the city rolling back to normal and get thuz infrastructure things fixed. >> particularly when a lot of the units we're going to be using are low income housing units, the buildings on the corners that are rent controlled with grocery stores below in richmond and sunset a lot of unb retrofitted buildings in the tenderloin are retrofitted to a standard if you walk out the door and tear them down. and the housing demands that are going to be placed on the city post earthquake, eight weeks to ten years out are going to be interesting to address. >> right. everybody says housing seems to be one of the biggest issues that we're going to be having to deal with. >> it was. that's how it's like in katrina. the people -- the low-income communities weren't able to

anticipate and, you know, sort of anticipate how to survive or, you know, kind of go through a crisis like that. and also weren't accommodated in any kind of recovery or rebuilding and i think that here we have had, i know that maybe you can talk a little bit more, lawrence about the caps program, the community action for seismic activity, the building department is undergoing where the city identified the unreinforced masonry buildings and an effort to seismically upgrade those and the caps program is identifying the next levels of risk of buildings with these soft story buildings that almost our entire rental and rent controlled stock in the city. >> caps study seems to show the housing impacts are, in fact, some of the most -- >> right. then some of the older cement

board buildings that don't have proper rebar in the cement itself really the things we can do at a policy level with the commission encouraging the board to make changes to, like, for instance, we had $100 million available to loan to building owners to upgrade their unreinforced masonry buildings. that wasn't used because people could get money on the commercial market cheaper. that money could be switched over to these new risk identified buildings and soft story buildings and the concrete board to encourage and incentivize these building owners to upzbraid. >> i'm a building inspector and doing it for a while and it sometimes leak making people do something, you know, the brick

building upgrade you have 12 years or whatever it is to do it. the incentivation if we can figure out a way to do it would be terrific, but it seems like mandates would be the approach. >> look at the number of brick build that's have been done since there's passed an ordinance, if you look at the soft story build that's have been done, i can count the ones i've done in my 27 years in career on two hands. >> i emphasize when you liken the situation to katrina, there's a big difference many the soft story building stock throughout the bay area is prevalent and high end condominiums that have been converted overtime the wood frame structure where is you have an automatic parking garage you drive in down mr. the marina district all throughout pacific heights, then you go out into the more sunset and out into newer areas of the city and that's where you have the

tuck-under garage types that are open. these are places, these are not just low-end units. so i don't think when we're looking at numbers like 250,000 displaced households with a repeat of 1906 in the bay area, you're not going to just be seeing low-income people displaced. it's going to be people of all income and it will be much like katrina in that people don't have earthquake insurance and the means and will just be overwelled with those numbers getting contractors and getting the resources together and competing and fighting for those resourcers going to be a real challenge for everybody, regardless of how much money you have. >> and those building when they do come back, rent control goes away by state law and they get rebuilt as condos. so we've incentivized not to retrofit these buildings because the price difference of the rent control building and cost to build sit less than selling a

brand new condo. so we're on the opposite side of encouraging people to retrofit these buildings. >> lawrence's point that we're going to have to at some point require people to do these upgrades -- >> yeah. >> just as we did for unreinforced masonry buildings, we all know sooner or later, ideally sooner, we're going to have to bring another set of buildings into the group where owners are required to do upgrades. we may have to revisit unreinforced masonry buildings and require them to be upgraded to a standard that will allow them to be reinhabited rather than torn down after an earthquake. >> right. the standard is collapse prevention you won't die and the bilgd won't collapse around you but it may not be repairable. >> yeah. we can look at action to the board of supervisors like we did with the