This research documents the beliefs and behavior of apartment building owners in Berkeley, California regarding the potential earthquake vulnerabilities of their properties. In doing so, the researcher capitalizes on observed variation in responses to a 2005 local ordinance that imposed new requirements on owners of a particularly hazardous and socially-important building type known as "soft-story" construction. Approximately 60 semi-structured interviews of Berkeley soft-story owners, including some owners that retrofit their buildings prior to the law and thus were exempt from it, will be conducted. Subjects will also complete a written questionnaire containing demographic, personality, and risk perception items. These qualitative and psychometric data will be combined with administrative information from compliance records, engineering reports, and building permit applications to comprehensively explore how this population frames their decisions about seismic safety and to assess commonalities and distinctions among multi-unit residential property owners who have implemented different degrees of structural mitigation. A second objective of the study is to look for indications of the mechanisms through which the recent law may have influenced owner thoughts, intentions, and behaviors about mitigation. The goal is to illuminate how social influences interact with individual differences in the formation and change of risk perceptions and risk adjustment behaviors in the target population and, specifically, to test the hypothesis that personality, social perceptions, past experiences, and demographic traits will correlate more with mitigation intentions and behavior than either risk perceptions or project cost-effectiveness.
The broader impact of the research is its contribution to the development of targeted, more effective risk communication approaches, policy designs, or incentives for motivating earthquake preparedness behaviors among similarly situated building owners.
Soft-, weak-, or open- front buildings built before the 1990s have an especially high risk of damage and collapse in a large earthquake. The City of Berkeley, California passed a novel earthquake safety ordinance in 2005 that mandated owners of 321 suspected soft-story apartment buildings to obtain an engineering evaluation. If the suspected hazard is confirmed, owners are required to notify tenants and post warning signs on the building until the property is retrofit. To document what motivated people to take precautionary actions or not in the context of this policy, we conducted 43 semi-structured in-depth interviews with a stratified random sample of Berkeley apartment owners using a mix of open-ended (conversational) and closed format (survey) questions. Specifically, we collected information to assess the relative influences on earthquake beliefs and preparedness behaviors of property owner or manager risk perceptions, economic reasoning, social influences, and individual characteristics such as personal background and personality traits by comparing interviewed retrofitters (N=28) to non-retrofitters (N=13). We also interviewed 22 key stakeholders about the development and implementation of the law. From this data, we developed a rich description of who is making decisions about this building type in Berkeley and how they think about investing in expensive seismic safety improvements. This research revealed that locally-mandated seismic evaluations can be influential in changing the minds and behavior of owners of high-risk apartment buildings. Within five years, about 20% of owners took voluntary precautions, about 60% performed the minimum mandatory steps, and about 15% shirked in the absence of active enforcement. Berkeley’s Soft-Story Ordinance (SSO) was successful at sensitizing the local owner population to the potential earthquake vulnerabilities of soft-story properties and changed their expectations as owners. Prior to the SSO, earthquake risks rarely factored into individual owner property search criteria or purchase decisions, even though these owners are highly aware of earthquake risks in general. Only non-profit institutions and a few of the most real estate-savvy owners had considered earthquake risks while making a property purchase decision or were previously aware that their building might be at risk. Five years later, all the interviewed owners perceive a new market reality for themselves and their properties, even though a few still do not believe their property is at risk. A key finding is that the SSO fundamentally altered owner perceptions about the economic and social consequences of leaving their buildings unimproved. Earthquake risk has now been incorporated into their own – and into potential buyers’ – assessments about the value and sell-ability of local soft-story buildings. Owners who did voluntary retrofits after the SSO appear to have done so largely because they became persuaded that their buildings actually were a collapse-hazard (and they were motivated to avoid the potential financial and legal implications), or that their building was sufficiently devalued or stigmatized by the law that a retrofit made sense in order to re-establish the market value and sell-ability of their asset. Although City of Berkeley staff were working under relatively favorable conditions to propone, pass, and implement this kind of law, two neighboring cities have passed similar legislation and several more are considering it. This research will directly aid these municipalities in justifying and implementing even more effective soft-story policies in these other localities. Insights gained are also applicable in developing strategic interventions for promoting other pro-social behaviors such as vaccination, disease screening, sun screen use, saving for retirement, civic volunteerism, charity giving, or adoption of water and energy conservation measures.
