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The city of Mountain View is poised to begin a $350,000 study to identify residential buildings that are prone to collapse in a powerful earthquake.
But there’s the question of whether the city would be retreading work that has already been done. San Jose State University released a study in 2006 surveying Santa Clara County’s “soft-story” buildings, so called because they have a structurally weak ground floor, typically open on one long side for parking, with apartment units above. Mountain View officials don’t know exactly how many of these buildings in the city could be at risk.
Soft-story buildings can be retrofitted to make them safer in an earthquake, and a number of Bay Area communities have already taken steps to require or encourage such remedial work.
Soft-story buildings are typically of wood-frame construction, and the large, open space on the ground floor, normally used for parking, often lacks the strength and stiffness needed to withstand an earthquake. In the 1994 Northridge earthquake, an estimated 200 soft-story buildings either collapsed or came close to collapsing, according to a San Jose State University study.
When Mountain View city staff came to the City Council in May to request an additional $175,000 in funding for the survey, slated to get underway next year, Mayor John McAlister was initially puzzled. He asked why the city needed to do something that had been completed nearly a decade ago, namely a survey identifying all the potentially hazardous soft-story buildings in Mountain View.
The university’s study itself, however, refers to a list of the soft-story buildings’ addresses, but doesn’t provide it. The study provides only vague maps showing clusters of the dangerous buildings. And while the list of addresses did exist, Community Development Director Randy Tsuda told the council at the April 28 meeting that when city staff requested it from San Jose State, they were denied that information and told the addresses were confidential.
It’s unclear why the safety data was withheld. The study by San Jose State University was publicly funded, in part, by the Santa Clara County Emergency Preparedness Council. The study was also done through the university’s Collaborative for Disaster Management, which was supported by grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. The collaborative received initial two-year funding from FEMA to the tune of $500,000.
When the Voice filed a California Public Records Act request in May for the addresses identified in the survey, university staff again refused to release it. Astrid Davis, vice president of administration and finance at San Jose State University, told the Voice that “the public interest in promoting research on important social issues outweighs any benefit the public might receive from gaining access to the records.” To disclose the records, she said in an email, would “discourage faculty from researching issues of public concern.”
The claim about academic freedom as a defense to withhold records doesn’t hold much water, according to Nikki Moore, an attorney for the California Newspaper Publishers Association. She said it’s not a legitimate response to a public records request.
“Nothing in the PRA says that’s a (legitimate) reason to withhold records,” Moore said.
The survey notes that it was agreed early on that there were “legal concerns” involved in identifying individual properties, and that information would be instead provided in an overlay of clusters on maps. When contacted by the Voice, university staff, the professor who headed the study and members of the county’s former Emergency Preparedness Council declined to explain why the agreement was made.
County Supervisor Joe Simitian said he was not familiar with the particular survey, but said there could have been some very good reasons to keep it anonymous. Simitian said there’s a “healthy tension” between providing information important to public policy and better engaging people for a study with the promise of anonymity.
“Someone obviously made the judgment at the time that they were more likely to engage in the cooperation of property owners in the county if they are not addressed specifically in the study,” Simitian said.
University spokeswoman Pat Harris said the university needs to abide by whatever constraints were agreed to between San Jose State and the funding sources for the university’s studies. She said it could be that there were serious concerns that property owners would be unhappy with a survey calling out their residential units for potential safety hazards.
“These private property owners may not like that very much, and we’re just eyeballing it — we might not know about any (prior) retrofitting,” Harris said.
Such concerns haven’t stopped cities like San Francisco and Berkeley from identifying individual soft-story buildings and putting the burden of proof of retrofitting on the property owners. Both cities require owners of soft-story buildings to find out, on their own dime, whether their apartments are hazardous, and if any retrofit work is needed to make the building a safe place to live.
In July, after the Voice pressed for another review of its Public Records Act request, Davis emailed the Voice explaining that the information couldn’t be provided because it had been destroyed. Davis said that “documents related to the project are no longer retained,” and do not have to be kept for more than three years following the study in accordance with the California State University retention policy.
It’s not clear how much the study would have helped Mountain View as it embarks on its own survey. Tsuda said it is likely that the city would have had to go out and verify the accuracy of the data. The study also didn’t include any options for how to get property owners to bring faulty buildings up to code, which the city’s study will include.
Palo Alto was able to obtain San Jose State’s comprehensive list identifying soft-story buildings in 2004, however, and has been using it as a basis for the city’s updated tally of potentially hazardous buildings. Palo Alto’s list originated from the same San Jose State study.
New safety rules
Mountain View has somewhere between 100 and 125 buildings with a soft-story design, which puts as many as 1,129 apartment units throughout the city potentially at risk, according to the San Jose State University study. That adds up to an estimated 2,823 residents in potentially at-risk buildings.
Once city staff members locate all those buildings, they can move on to the next step. Tsuda said city officials will explore possible incentives for getting property owners to inspect their soft-story buildings and bring them up to code, if needed. The other option would be to make these retrofits mandatory.
The city could adopt soft-story policies similar to the ones in Berkeley, where owners are required to submit reports to the city showing any structural weaknesses, as well as identify how the building could be retrofitted to mitigate the earthquake hazard. The city also requires soft-story building owners to post a sign on the building in plain sight stating that the building is unsafe and has a weak ground floor.
In Mountain View, there is no requirement for property owners to inform tenants that they are living in a soft-story building that has not been retrofitted.
And the clock is ticking. Recent reports by the U.S. Geological Survey predict a 72 percent chance of an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.7 or higher in the next 30 years, which is up from the 63 percent chance identified in a 2008 study.
Why would they give the data to Palo Alto but they won’t give it to Mountain View?
I can imagine all the property owners of these “soft story” buildings evicting their current residents to do the seismic upgrades and passing on the new higher costs to new tenants, further exasperating the problems we have in the gentrification of Mountain View.
I think any further funding of San Jose State research projects needs to be put on hold until an audit determine if such projects actually took place.
SJ State may be a horribly-administrated and 3rd rate college, but maybe there are proper legal reasons for its decision not to release these data (not “this data”, data is plural for you English challenged public school teachers and journalists)! Specifically, releasing data for specific addresses could expose SJ State to liability from civil lawsuits challenging its data. There are lots of cheap and starving lawyers out there willing to work for contingency fees in hope of striking it rich. If I were their legal counsel, I’d advise them most strongly only to release data that do not identify properties by address but only by neighborhood.
I disagree with the “healthy tension” argument. Isn’t SJSU a public
institution? Shouldn’t data produced with public money be public? Even
if there *is* some sort of privacy argument (I think the Courts have
shown, with NSA-related rulings, that we entitled to none), I think the
data could/should be disclosed to City Staff, so that additional delay
can be avoided.
@OldMV
While the word “data” is often treated as a plural noun, it is most frequently used and widely accepted in the English language as a mass noun which can take the singular usage of words like “is” or “this”. This usage is also supported by several dictionaries and style guides.
People in the hard sciences like Physics and Chemistry still tend to treat “data” as plural. Since I’m a hard scientist and I analyze a lot of data, I consider it plural. People in the press who treat it as singular really bother me. To me, that’s almost as bad a sin as splitting infinitives. It’s all a matter of preference and what we were taught.
@OldMV
In this case, either usage would be correct. I hope you’d concede that English (or linguistics for that matter) is very flexible and evolves more quickly than some scientific disciplines. Since this isn’t a “hard” science discussion or journal, I would suggest accepting this alternate (and valid) treatment of “data”. It’s not worth letting it get to you and distracts from the argument about the data.
mr_b, what my Old-MV neighbor tried to bring out above is a deeper language principle that many people don’t seem to “get,” though it be second-nature to serious writers and fans of language.
This isn’t about one usage being “correct,” but about cues that the usage choice reveals, implicitly, about the writer’s sensibilities. I bet you can find dictionary defenses for people to write “a news media” (when they mean medium) or “a data” (when they mean datum), or even “in regards to” — yet those _choices_ raise flags to readers who really know the words. In the story context here, “this data” actually is milder (less exceptionable) than “a data” (thanks to a potential sense of the full data set in question being a single entity); neither is as unexceptionable as “these data.” It’s about connotations.
PS to OldMV: Your point on SJ State’s decision is solid. OTOH, and although some conservatively edited media (e.g. WSJ) discourage it from their writers, the notion of a “split infinitive rule” in English is famously spurious — it was an assumption some people once carelessly extended from other tongues (especially Latin) whose infinitive verb form is different. Strunk & White discredited it definitively and wittily, generations ago — consult that standard source for more.
@Common sense
Fans of language also “get” that the context of audience may give you a reason to choose one acceptable form over another in order to make things more readable to that audience (in this case a local newspaper vs. a scholarly, scientific journal). If there is some specific connotation to be derived from the usage in this article allowing for additional insight or criticism, it has yet to be presented by either you or OldMV.
Fans of English (not just those who are fans of its usage in scientific or academic contexts) know that both plural and mass noun forms of “data” are considered standard usage. Jabbing at journalists and teachers while using a limited understanding of how the term can be used earned a response.
What’s especially sad is this argument is taking place over an article where a university has taken public funds to perform a public safety study, and has refused to release the newly-categorized-as-destroyed data after releasing the data to a neighboring city that is using it in a similar way MV would. Is SJSU trying to ‘protect’ future researchers from receiving public funding? Just who are they protecting?
“People in the hard sciences like Physics and Chemistry ”
People that capitalize common nouns really bother me.
And people that hi-jack the comments of a meaningful article with petty (and incorrect) pedantry bother me even more.
mr_b, I’m also in accord about what seems the core issue, the Big Deal Here: SJSU (as you succinctly wrote) “refused to release the newly-categorized-as-destroyed data after releasing the data to a neighboring city that is using it in a similar way MV would.” The stronger the school’s arguments for withholding, the more this inconsistency equals impropriety.
My comment on usage connotations was an effort precisely to break out of the “considered-standard-usage” thinking box. English abounds in almost-equivalent ways to say something, all “considered standard usage” by linguists and dictionaries (because, uh, people use them) — but unequal in their effect on readers. “The above example” sounds literate enough to many people, but “the example above” sounds that way to even more (including, again, experienced writers and editors who know the words better). Sure, it’s a small point to recognize that “share these data” will likely bother fewer people than “share this data” (and whether fewer or not, they’ll be different people, and for different reasons) — but just such nuances are what wordsmiths learn in their trade.
@Uh Oh: I live in an apartment that’s probably soft story, and I’d rather get evicted than die.
@the city researchers: I hope you crowdsource things! Set up a website where people can flag buildings for you to look at. My apartment building from the steet looks fine, but once you get into the complex you see that apartments are built over car ports. I’d hate for it to be missed.