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Up and down the West Coast, cities face high risk of earthquakes. In Seattle, there is an 85% chance of a major quake in the next 50 years. Historic brick buildings are most at risk. There is even a small chance that hundreds of them could completely collapse in Seattle. City officials are encouraging owners to retrofit, but protecting historic buildings and their residents could mean a loss of affordable housing. Joshua McNichols with KUOW's economy podcast, Booming, reports.
JOSHUA MCNICHOLS, BYLINE: When the Nisqually earthquake hit Seattle's Chinatown-International District in 2001, Leslie Morishita was working in an old brick building. The structure started swaying back and forth. As she stands outside the same building today, she remembers what it was like.
LESLIE MORISHITA: We got out of there, and we did not dare go back inside (laughter). And people were just wandering around and saying, are you OK? Are you OK? And there were bricks on the sidewalks because parapets of the old buildings had collapsed. I think a car got smooshed.
MCNICHOLS: That was the last big earthquake in Seattle. It caused $2 billion in damage. There are a lot of earthquake risks in Washington state. There's the Cascadia Subduction Zone along the coast and shallow faults that run under cities like Seattle. Morishita works for an affordable housing and community development nonprofit trying to preserve old brick buildings, and this part of Seattle has many. She walks a little bit further and points out a favorite - the West Kong Yick building.
MORISHITA: As you can see, it's in rough condition.
MCNICHOLS: She says it's important to the community for its beauty and for its connection to an old association of Chinese families that built it, and for its affordability. It used to have 128 apartments. Morishita, whose organization has worked closely with the owner in hopes of buying the building, says some of them have been remodeled, but most are in no shape to rent out because the plumbing or electrical doesn't work or the stairs to reach them aren't safe to climb. Only about a dozen are occupied.
MORISHITA: It's mostly elder Chinese folks - limited English speaking, extremely low income. I mean, they live here mostly because the rent is very, very low.
MCNICHOLS: Like, $150 a month for a tiny studio with shared bathrooms or $650 for a one-bedroom. That's almost so low it defies belief in high-rent Seattle. The city wants to make it mandatory to retrofit buildings like these so they can withstand the next earthquake. That means adding all kinds of metal supports to prevent them from swaying too much and breaking apart. Morishita's nonprofit supports this move but worries many older buildings could become unaffordable.
MORISHITA: Our concern is that it's going to scare owners and they're going to sell. They're going to be like, we - there's no way. We don't have this kind of money. We can't do it.
MCNICHOLS: They might sell to someone with no ties to the community who tears it down or fixes it up and jacks up the rent. Affordable housing experts in Seattle say this could happen across the city. Jan Johnson owns the Panama Hotel in historic Japantown. She had another concern - abandonment. She says this risk is especially high in neighborhoods with strong historic preservation protections. She made an analogy to what happened when the city began requiring fire sprinkler systems in buildings.
JAN JOHNSON: They made it mandatory you had to sprinkle, and a lot of people couldn't afford it. And so they just shut the buildings down, and they became a ghost town.
MCNICHOLS: City of Seattle officials are aware of these risks, and they're aware that building owners who can't afford the upgrades could sue. So the city's holding off on making seismic upgrades mandatory until it finds money to help partially reimburse owners. But in the meantime, it's done something profound to encourage voluntary compliance. The city lowered its standards in 2023 for what is considered safe enough - at least for retrofits.
AMANDA HERTZFELD: The bottom line for me is that doing something is better than nothing.
MCNICHOLS: That's Amanda Hertzfeld. She leads the city's retrofit program, and she's promoted a counterintuitive idea that lowering the standard can actually save more lives. Before, buildings had to be able to survive an earthquake. Now, the city building code only requires that people can escape alive in a quake, even if the building must be demolished afterward. That means using less metal to reinforce a building. Hertzfeld says for structures that qualify, this alternate method is about half the cost of a more comprehensive seismic upgrade.
HERTZFELD: The comprehensive method, you could say, is the modern car version of a retrofit. You could add antilock braking. You could add lane assist, whereas the alternate method is really like, let's put a seat belt in your car.
MCNICHOLS: So how safe is that seat belt? I put that question to John Hooper. He's a structural engineer at Magnusson Klemencic Associates in Seattle. Hooper has been fighting to raise, not lower, seismic standards for new buildings. But he says lowering the standard to retrofit old brick buildings is a sound decision, even if some are irreparably damaged.
JOHN HOOPER: You will save lives that way. So that's the trade-off and the balance that we're trying to achieve, not only here in Seattle but anywhere in high-seismic regions across the United States.
MCNICHOLS: He says this approach is common in California, where engineers have been aware of their earthquake problem at least since the San Francisco quake of 1906. Megan Anderson is a seismologist for Washington state. She says that long history is why California cities are so far ahead of Seattle.
MEGAN ANDERSON: They've had 120 years of science, doing these kinds of studies, to lay out where the faults are and understand how they move over time and try to understand what are the risks to communities. And we're only, you know, about 35 years in, 30 years in.
MCNICHOLS: In the end, Seattle faces hard choices. It can't have long-term preservation, affordability and widespread adoption by building owners, but it may be able to have modest measures of all three.
For NPR News, I'm Joshua McNichols in Seattle. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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