If you own a condo in Oakland or Berkeley and you’ve been comparing notes with a friend in a San Francisco HOA, you may have noticed something confusing: your retrofit deadlines, requirements, and even your building’s eligibility don’t line up at all. That’s not a mistake. Each city wrote its own seismic retrofit rules, on its own timeline, with its own definitions of what counts as risky.

For HOA boards and homeowners, that means assuming your neighbor city’s rules apply to you can lead to missed deadlines, wrong assumptions about exemptions, or budgeting for the wrong type of retrofit altogether.

Here’s how the three cities actually differ, and why it matters for your HOA’s planning.

Why Three Cities, Three Different Programs

The Bay Area sits on multiple active fault lines, and each city’s seismic retrofit program grew out of its own history with earthquake damage, its own building stock, and its own political timeline for passing legislation. There’s no statewide mandate forcing every city to adopt the same rules, so each program reflects local risk assessments and local politics as much as it reflects engineering science.

This is why a building that’s exempt in one city might be squarely inside the mandatory program in another, even if the construction looks similar.

San Francisco’s Program: The Original Model

San Francisco passed its Mandatory Soft Story Program in 2013, making it one of the earliest and most closely watched seismic retrofit ordinances in California. The program targets wood-frame buildings with five or more units, three or more stories, and a construction permit dated before January 1, 1978.

Most San Francisco buildings under this program have already passed their compliance deadlines, since the city’s tiers were structured to be completed within a few years of the original 2013 notices.

Oakland’s Program: A Later Start, Broader Construction Window

Oakland didn’t pass its current mandatory retrofit ordinance until 2019, six years after San Francisco. Oakland’s program also uses a different construction cutoff, targeting buildings permitted before 1991 rather than 1978. That’s a meaningfully wider net, since it captures buildings constructed under building codes that were already somewhat more earthquake-aware than the pre-1978 stock San Francisco focuses on.

Oakland’s compliance tiers are also structured differently, with deadlines for evaluation, permitting, and construction spread across four to six years depending on building size, rather than the more compressed timeline San Francisco used.

Berkeley’s Program: An Extra Layer for an Extra Risk

Berkeley’s situation is the most distinct of the three, largely because of its direct proximity to the Hayward Fault, which seismologists consider one of the most likely sources of a major Bay Area earthquake in the coming decades.

Berkeley regulates wood-frame soft-story buildings with five or more units under its own ordinance, with an original compliance deadline requiring permit applications by the end of 2016 and construction completion within two years after that. But Berkeley’s program goes further than San Francisco or Oakland by also regulating unreinforced masonry buildings separately, a building type with its own dedicated municipal code chapter due to how poorly older brick construction performs in earthquakes.

This means a Berkeley HOA board may need to track two completely different sets of seismic requirements depending on the building’s construction type, something that simply doesn’t apply in the same way to most San Francisco or Oakland HOAs.

A Side-by-Side Look at the Key Differences

1. Construction cutoff year: San Francisco and Berkeley generally target buildings from before 1978, while Oakland’s program extends to buildings built before 1991
2. Program start date: San Francisco’s program began in 2013, Berkeley’s in 2014, and Oakland’s not until 2019
3. Building types covered: Berkeley separately regulates unreinforced masonry buildings, while San Francisco and Oakland focus primarily on wood-frame soft-story conditions
4. Compliance timelines: Oakland’s tiers are generally longer and more recently active, while many San Francisco deadlines have already passed
5. Funding programs: Each city offers different grant and financing options, and they are not interchangeable between jurisdictions

What This Means for Your HOA’s Planning

If your HOA board assumes your building falls under the same rules as a similar one in a neighboring city, you risk planning around the wrong deadline or the wrong scope of work entirely. A board that budgeted based on San Francisco’s program timeline, for example, could be caught off guard by Oakland’s later and differently structured compliance schedule.

This is also why retrofit cost estimates you hear about from a friend’s HOA in a different city may not transfer directly to your own budget. Construction cutoff years, building classifications, and required scope of work all affect cost, and none of those are identical across the three cities.

This is one of the areas where local experience matters more than generic advice. Management partners like HOA Unlimited work across multiple Bay Area cities and routinely deal with exactly this kind of jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction variation, which is part of why boards often bring in outside expertise rather than relying on word of mouth from a neighboring building.

Questions Every Board Should Ask About Their Building

Before assuming your building is or isn’t covered by a mandatory program, your board should confirm a few specifics directly with the relevant city department.

• What year was the building permitted, and does that fall within your city’s specific cutoff?
• Does your building’s construction type, wood-frame, masonry, or another category, match what your city’s ordinance actually regulates?
• Has your building already been screened, and if so, what was the outcome?
• What compliance tier does your building fall into, and what are the actual remaining deadlines?
• Are there city-specific grant or financing programs your HOA hasn’t applied for yet?

Both the City of Berkeley and the City of Oakland maintain dedicated program pages with screening tools and compliance status lookups, and confirming your building’s status directly through those sources is far more reliable than assuming based on a similar building elsewhere.

A Few Quick Questions Homeowners Often Ask

Does my HOA need to retrofit if our building is in a different city than where the rule originated? Each city’s ordinance only applies within that city’s own jurisdiction, so a building in Oakland is governed by Oakland’s program regardless of how San Francisco or Berkeley structure theirs.

Can a building be exempt in one city but mandatory in a neighboring one? Yes. Different construction cutoff years and building classifications mean a building that’s exempt under one city’s rules could be squarely inside another city’s mandatory program if it were located there instead.

Who pays for these retrofits in an HOA building? This typically depends on your governing documents and state reserve fund requirements, though most HOAs plan for major structural work like this through reserve funds built up over time specifically for large capital expenses.

Getting the Details Right Matters More Than Assuming

Seismic retrofit rules in the Bay Area were never designed to be uniform, and treating them as if they are is one of the more common and costly mistakes an HOA board can make. Confirming your building’s specific status directly with your city, rather than assuming based on a nearby building’s experience, is the only reliable way to plan your budget and timeline correctly.

HOAs that work with experienced local management partners often catch these jurisdiction-specific differences earlier, simply because tracking multiple cities’ compliance programs is part of how a professional management team operates day to day.

Check your building’s permit year, confirm your city’s specific program requirements, and don’t assume your neighbor’s timeline is your own. In a region with this many fault lines and this many different ordinances, the details are the whole story.