In 2013, the City of San Francisco embarked on an ambitious and groundbreaking endeavor: the mandatory seismic retrofit of its wood-framed soft-story apartment buildings. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake caused considerable damage to such buildings in the Marina District (Figure 1) and exposed the vulnerability of buildings with soft and weak first stories. Yes, even wood-framed buildings, thought by most engineers to be the most naturally earthquake resistant type of structure due to their lightweight nature and reserve strength, can collapse under the right (or perhaps wrong) circumstances. According to a 2016 report by the Association of Bay Area Governments, San Francisco had 6,700 soft-story buildings, far more than the rest of the region combined. …