There’s a growing effort underway to make California communities safer, as cities throughout the state adopt new laws requiring seismic retrofits of buildings proven to be vulnerable to damage in an earthquake. San Francisco, Berkeley and other Bay Area cities were among the first to mandate earthquake retrofits for wood-framed, soft-story buildings – structures with open parking on the ground floor and apartment units built on the stories above. Los Angeles sparked the trend in Southern California with the nation’s most sweeping seismic retrofit law, adopted in 2015.