The Legislature finds and declares that:

(a) Because of the generally acknowledged fact that California will experience moderate to severe earthquakes in the foreseeable future, increased efforts to reduce earthquake hazards should be encouraged and supported.

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(b) Tens of thousands of buildings subject to severe earthquake hazards continue to be a serious danger to the life and safety of hundreds of thousands of Californians who live and work in them in the event of an earthquake.

(c) Improvement of safety to life is the primary goal of building reconstruction to reduce earthquake hazards.

(d) In order to make building reconstruction economically feasible for, and to provide improvement of the safety of life in, seismically hazardous buildings, building standards enacted by local government for building reconstruction may differ from building standards which govern new building construction.

(e) “Soft story” residential buildings are a subset of multistory woodframe structures that may have inadequately braced lower stories that may not be able to resist earthquake motion.

(f) Soft story residential buildings are an important component of the state‘s housing stock and are in jeopardy of being lost in the event of a major earthquake.

(g) Soft story residential buildings were responsible for 7,700 of the 16,000 housing units rendered uninhabitable by the Loma Prieta earthquake and over 34,000 of the housing units rendered uninhabitable by the Northridge earthquake.

(h) During an earthquake, soft story residential buildings may create dangerous conditions as illustrated in the Northridge Meadows apartment failure that claimed the lives of 16 residents.

(i) The collapse of soft story residential buildings can ignite fires that threaten trapped occupants and neighboring buildings and complicates emergency response.

(j) The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) estimates that soft story residential buildings will be responsible for 66 percent of the uninhabitable housing following an event on the Hayward fault.

(k) The failure of soft story residential buildings is estimated by ABAG to be the source of a disproportionate share of the public shelter population because they tend to be occupied by the very poor, the very old, and the very young.

(l) The Seismic Safety Commission has recommended that legislation be enacted to require state and local building code enforcement agencies to identify potentially hazardous buildings and to adopt mandatory mitigation programs that will significantly reduce unacceptable hazards in buildings by 2020.

(m) The current nationally recognized model code relating to the retrofit of existing buildings is Appendix Chapter A4 of the International Existing Building Code. However, it is not the intent of the Legislature, if other model codes relating to the retrofit of existing buildings are developed, to limit the California Building Standards Commission or a local government, pursuant to Section 19162, to adopting a particular model code.

(n) Therefore, it is the intent of the Legislature to encourage cities and counties to address the seismic safety of soft story residential buildings and encourage local governments to initiate efforts to reduce the seismic risk in vulnerable soft story residential buildings.

(Amended by Stats. 2005, Ch. 525, Sec. 1. Effective January 1, 2006.)