Los Angeles residents strongly support the city’s historic earthquake retrofit law, a new poll finds, despite decades of conventional wisdom that such a rule would be politically unpopular due to its high cost.

More than 8 in 10 LA residents support the retrofit bill, passed in 2015 and targeting certain fragile concrete buildings and apartment buildings with weak first floors, according to a March 912 Suffolk University/Los Angeles Times poll. Only 9% were against the law, and 8% were undecided.

“Oh my God. That’s amazing! Wow… I’m happy,” seismologist Lucy Jones said of the survey results.

Jones, a former U.S. Geological Survey scientist, served as a science advisor to Mayor Eric Garcetti for a year in 2014 to extensively study seismic safety in L.A. Garcetti. Garcetti then proposed the retrofit law

,

passed with the unanimous support of the city council in October 2015, the most sweeping retrofit law of its kind in the entire country.

In previous years, even some prominent proponents of mandatory retrofits had said so

it would be “political suicide” for councilors to support such a costly cause

required.

The poll found that bipartisan support for the retrofit law is a rarity at a time when many issues are sharply divided along party lines. 88% of Democrats supported it, as did 77% of Republicans and 78% of independents.

Since the law was passed, Los Angeles has made significant progress in strengthening its earthquake-prone apartment buildings with weak first floors, often known as “dingbats” or “soft story” buildings. Such buildings are ubiquitous across much of Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area, with housing units built on carports supported by thin posts, which are vulnerable to collapse in an earthquake.

A common retrofit technique for soft storey buildings is to install steel frames on the ground floor.

Of the more than 12,400 buildings within the city limits that have weak first floors, more than 8,600 have been modified. That’s a 69% completion rate.

The price tag for those retrofits likely topped out at more than $1.3 billion, according to an analysis released in October.

Progress in retrofitting non-deformable concrete buildings in the other major category covered by the law has been much slower. In such buildings, the configuration of steel reinforcing bars in the concrete frame is inadequate and the concrete can explode from its columns when shaken, causing catastrophic collapse.

The city has more than 1,300 such buildings, and they were given a 25-year deadline to complete the renovation.

However, structural engineers say they are aware of dozens of concrete building renovation projects that are at some stage of design, with several underground.

Angelenos has taken note of the pace of apartment retrofits with weak first floors. According to the poll, 52% of LA residents said they believed some or much progress had been made in retrofitting older buildings to make them more earthquake resistant, compared to 24% who said they believed there had been little or no progress booked.

Renewed attention to the threat of earthquake-prone buildings in Los Angeles arose after a 2013 Times investigation that focused on non-deformable concrete buildings and the city’s failure to act despite decades of awareness of the risk.

A US Geological Survey simulation said a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Southern California could make it likely that 50 non-deformable concrete buildings collapse in whole or in part, containing as many as 7,500 people.

In California, only three cities have mandatory retrofit rules for non-deformable concrete buildings LA, Santa Monica and West Hollywood, leaving other major cities such as Long Beach, San Francisco and San Jose vulnerable.

Requirements to retrofit soft storey buildings are becoming more common. In addition to Los Angeles, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Culver City, Beverly Hills and Pasadena are in need of retrofits. In Northern California, San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, and Fremont do.

That still leaves many communities without a requirement, from beach towns south of Santa Monica to the San Gabriel Valley, and across broad swathes of the San Francisco Bay Area, including Silicon Valley, which sits on the edge of the San Andreas Fault , and Hayward , which is directly on top of the Hayward error.

San Jose and Long Beach have ordered inventories of soft-story condos and are discussing ordinances to require retrofits.

Some earthquake safety advocates expressed hope that the study’s results would encourage other cities to introduce retrofit requirements.

“I am very grateful that Los Angeles has moved forward with this. There are many communities that are closer to the San Andreas [fault] who don’t have,” Jones said.

Garcetti said in a statement he was not surprised by the large majority in favor of the retrofit rule and hopes it spurs other cities to take action.

“I’m glad we did this hard work and took action to protect lives, not after a deadly earthquake, but before disaster strikes,” Garcetti said. “It is my deepest hope that all local jurisdictions in Southern California and across the country will follow suit. Earthquakes do not respect city boundaries.

With the new focus on buildings vulnerable to earthquakes, structural engineer David Cocke, the immediate former president of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, urged communities to go back and reassess their stock of vulnerable buildings and look at mandatory retrofits. Some communities, such as cities in the Inland Empire, have not yet ordered the demolition or modification of older brick buildings, known as plain brick buildings, which Los Angeles addressed in 1981.

The new poll of 500 LA residents was taken about a month after a series of powerful 7.8-magnitude earthquakes.

Many of the deaths occurred in the same type of non-nodular concrete

structures targeted by LA’s retrofit law.

As the death toll rose in Turkey and Syria, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in February took the first step toward a mandatory earthquake retrofit order for non-ductile concrete buildings it owns, as well as all buildings in unincorporated areas of the province. including East LA, Florence-Firestone, Hacienda Heights, South Whittier, Rowland Heights, and Altadena. About 1 in 10 LA County residents live in unincorporated communities.

Supervisors also ordered an inventory of residential buildings with weak first floors in the unincorporated area.

That inventory assignment drew opposition from a lobbyist representing apartment owners. Max Sherman, of the Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, told regulators last month that creating an inventory of potentially vulnerable apartments would likely cause a dramatic increase in insurance premiums for building owners.

While seismic modifications meet a vital need, it’s important to recognize that these projects are extremely costly, he said. We are asking the county not to initiate this process as housing providers are still reeling from financial hardship from the pandemic, including months of missed eviction moratorium rents and a rent freeze.

But former member of the LA City Council

Greig

Smith, who advocated for earthquakes during his tenure, urged other local governments to take action.

“This is the problem with the government, after serving in government for 33 years: it’s reactionary,” Smith said in an interview. He urged other council members: “Think forward, not backward.”

The Suffolk University/Los Angeles Times poll interviewed 500 adult residents of the city of Los Angeles, making live calls to cell phones and landlines. Quotas and demographic information, including region, race, and age, were determined from census and American Community Survey data. Surveys were conducted in English and Spanish.

The sampling error margin for the total sample is 4.4 percentage points in both directions. Margins of error increase for smaller subgroups. All surveys may be subject to other sources of error, including but not limited to coverage errors and measurement errors.