Case Study 01 — Eligibility Failure
The Ineligible Home
A prescriptive retrofit was permitted and completed on a hillside home. The plan assumed flat ground. The permit record never acknowledged the difference.
Seattle's prescriptive seismic retrofit templates are written for a specific condition: a wood-frame home on a flat lot with a continuous foundation perimeter. That describes a lot of Seattle housing stock. It does not describe a hillside home. A hillside home sits on a stepped foundation — different elevation levels, different lateral load demands at each step, a geometry that changes everything about how seismic forces travel through the structure. The prescriptive plan was not written for this. It cannot be applied to it without site-specific engineering.
The permit record for this property shows a standard STFI fast-track scope: anchor bolts, cripple wall plywood, hold-downs at template locations. No hillside condition noted. No stepped foundation analysis included. A review of King County parcel data and public street-level imagery confirms the home sits on a visibly sloped lot with a stepped foundation — the kind of site condition apparent from the sidewalk, let alone a field visit. The eligibility gap between the site and the plan is not subtle. It simply was not checked.
The retrofit passed inspection. The hardware is real. The permit is closed. And the home's seismic vulnerability is substantially unchanged, because the work addressed the wrong structural problem. The homeowner has a completed permit and an unaddressed risk — with no indication from the record that anything went wrong.
This case was identified through permit record review, not a client engagement. The mismatch between site geometry and permitted scope is visible in public data. That is what independent structural review catches — not by accessing anything private, but by actually reading what the public record shows and comparing it to what the site requires.
Independent Review
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