Apartment Owners Beware: Don’t Lose Your Parking Spaces Due to the Soft Story Retrofit Ordinance!

If you are a building owner that must comply with the soft-story retrofit ordinance, you need to know the latest news! Due to continuous complaints from tenants about reduction in parking stall width, the city has required that the soft story retrofit program comply with the strictest parking codes.

These parking codes no longer allow for soft-story retrofits to make parking stalls go from full-size (8 feet wide stalls) to compact (7 foot 6 inch wide stalls) making the soft story retrofit significantly more difficult and expensive! Before these restrictions were in place, engineers would place one new column that was 12 inches wide behind or in front of existing columns. With these new restrictions, engineers have to place two or more smaller columns to meet the same ordinance requirements. What that means is double the work for the same result!

Additionally, engineers are allowed to reduce up to 20% of the existing parking stalls to make up for these more restrictive parking codes. That means an inexperienced engineer may block up to 1 out of 5 parking spots through their design.

Don’t let an inexperienced engineer make mistakes in their design that can devalue your property. Titan Commercial Retrofit has designed hundreds of soft story retrofit plans and has never blocked a parking spot. Last month alone, Titan was approached by 5 different clients to re-engineer plans for them that had their parking spot(s) permanently blocked. Titan is happy to have saved all of our clients’ parking spots while lessening the scope of work by over 30%.

Contact Titan Commercial Retrofit for a free consultation and estimate for your building today. Let the experts with over 30 years experience engineer and build your soft story retrofit so that you can have piece of mind. With a senior engineer, architects, 80 construction crew employees, and a 42,000 square foot structural steel fabrication lot, Titan is the right choice for you. Come visit us today!