San Jose now requires owners of qualifying wood-frame buildings to screen and retrofit them. Roughly 3,500 buildings and about 25,000 housing units are affected. We are based here and this is our home market.
The ordinance generally applies to wood-frame residential buildings with three or more units that have a soft, weak, or open front condition. That usually means the ground floor was opened up for parking, garages, or storage, leaving too little wall to resist earthquake shaking.
The city has an inventory of buildings it believes are affected and is notifying owners. If you received a notice, keep it. It states which compliance group your building falls into, which determines your deadlines.
If you have not received anything and think your building might qualify, contact the city directly rather than waiting.
Phone: (408) 535-3598
Email: softstoryretrofit@sanjoseca.gov
They can confirm whether your property is on the inventory and which group it is in.
| Requirement | Deadline |
|---|---|
| Screening report filed with the city | October 1, 2027 |
| Construction complete, Group 1 (pre-1978, 5+ units) | April 1, 2029 |
| Construction complete, later groups | Staged through 2033 |
Confirm your specific group and dates with the city. Group assignments depend on building age and unit count, and the schedule has multiple tiers.
Engineering, plan check, and permitting routinely take months before a single day of construction happens. With thousands of buildings working toward the same deadlines, engineers and contractors in this market will get booked. Owners who wait until the deadline is close will pay more and have fewer options.
They are separate things that overlap. The San Jose ordinance is a legal requirement. EMR is a state grant that may help pay for it.
If your building has five to ten units, you may be able to use EMR funding toward the work the ordinance already requires. If your building has three or four units, or more than ten, the ordinance still applies but EMR will not. See our EMR grant page for details.
Cost depends on how many steel moment frames the engineer's design requires, which depends on how many open bays your ground floor has. Unit count is a poor predictor. Two five-unit buildings can differ by a factor of three.
We price these in two phases: a firm number for engineering, then a firm construction number once the design is stamped. Any contractor quoting a hard construction price before there are drawings is guessing.
Ordinance requirements and deadlines are set by the City of San Jose and may change. Verify current requirements with the Building Division. This page is informational and does not substitute for official guidance.
Send us your address and unit count. We will tell you whether your building looks affected, which group it likely falls in, and what the work involves.