Seeking soft-story retrofit company recommendations

The City of Oakland passed an ordinance a while back requiring all multi-unit buildings with "soft stories" -- street-level garage(s) under the first floor of living space -- to perform a specific type of seismic retrofit. I think the deadline is coming up and I have no idea who to hire for something like this. If anyone has recommendations, they'd be very much appreciated. Thanks!

Parent Replies

New responses are no longer being accepted.

In 2018, we first thought we would do a simple earthquake retrofit through Oakland's brace and bolt program, but soon learned we had to do a pretty extensive seismic retrofit of the crawlspace/basement of our duplex. We do not have the soft stories issue, however. We went with E&F Construction, which comes highly rated. Caveat though, we scheduled a vacation at the same time as the retrofit construction, so we were not around during the actual construction, but were very pleased with the final result. Good luck!

Tony Elenteny
E & F Construction
510 388-9250
tony [at] efconstructionservices.com (tony[at]efconstructionservices[dot]com)