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The purpose of this Chapter is to promote the health, safety, and welfare of San Francisco residents as well as the ability of the City and County of San Francisco to recover from a major earthquake by reducing the possibility of collapse, major structural damage, or risk of fire caused by an earthquake to certain wood-frame buildings.
In furtherance of this purpose, this Chapter establishes seismic retrofit requirements intended to signifi- cantly reduce the collapse risk of residential buildings with critically vulnerable lower stories and to increase the likelihood that these buildings will be structurally safe to occupy shortly after an earthquake. The engineering criteria established by this Chapter generally limit the structural retrofit work to the ground story or to a basement or underfloor area that extends above grade where the most critical vulnerabilities are typically located, thereby improving building performance while limiting retrofit costs and impacts.