William J. Petak's Profile

Thanks Bill.I will respond through Kate's thread, "Relevance and Need for an Earthquake Building Performance Rating System."  I will do that at some point, later.In short, however, in our CAPSS effort, we spent a lot of time thinking about how we were going to cause vulnerable buildings in SF (65% of which is non-owner occupied) to undergo retrofit.  It became obvious that the main problem was with residential buildings, not the commercial stock.  The "BOMA buildings" (as I call them) have been pretty effective in self-regulating, and self-correcting, since commercial players (owners, tenants, lenders, and so on) tend to be more sophisticated and  better informed.  We figured that if we brought the same level of knowledge to the residential market (primarily multi-unit, rental properties), the market would cause retrofits to take place.  In order to cause "market based retrofits" to occur, the essential components would have to include evaluations, and public dissemination of those evaluations.  Interestingly, residential landlords have a higher duty of care than commercial landlords, yet they have been less proactive in addressing that obligation (and liability).John