WEST HOLLYWOOD—On Thursday, September 9, the city of West Hollywood disclosed the California Residential Mitigation Program (CRMP) announced the opening of a grant registration period for the Earthquake Multi-Unit Retrofit (EMR) Program, running through Wednesday, September 30.
The program offers incentive payments to owners of eligible older 5- to 10-unit apartment buildings required to retrofit under local ordinances, helping offset the cost of bringing such buildings into compliance.
West Hollywood adopted seismic retrofit requirements aimed at improving the safety and resilience of potentially vulnerable buildings during a major earthquake. The city’s requirements address several types of existing buildings, including wood-frame buildings with soft, weak, or open-front walls; non-ductile concrete buildings; and pre-Northridge steel moment-frame buildings. The city established voluntary provisions with minimum seismic design and strengthening standards intended to improve life safety, reduce the risk of building collapse, and help limit the loss of housing and economic disruption following a significant earthquake. Visit www.weho.org/seismic for information.
The Earthquake Multi-Unit Retrofit (EMR) Program is available to qualifying wood-frame buildings with 5 to 10 units, built before January 1, 1991, with a soft, weak, or open front (SWOF) seismic deficiency, and where the building owner has received a notice to retrofit under a mandatory ordinance. Eligible buildings must be located in one of 14 California cities that have adopted such ordinances: Albany, Berkeley, Mill Valley, Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose in Northern California; and Beverly Hills, Burbank, Culver City, Los Angeles, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Torrance, and West Hollywood. To see if one qualifies visit the EMR webpage at www.crmp.org.
Eligible building owners can receive an incentive payment covering 70 percent of engineering and permit fees, up to $7,000, along with 70 percent of retrofit construction costs, up to $4,260 per unit. In total, EMR provides earthquake retrofit grant assistance up to $49,600 for multi-family buildings. This funding is not available in combination with other FEMA grant funding. The EMR grant program is administered by CRMP, a Joint Powers Authority between the California Earthquake Authority (CEA) and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES).
In addition to EMR, CRMP administers the Earthquake Brace + Bolt (EBB) and Earthquake Soft-Story (ESS) grant programs. In 2025, CRMP provided grant funding for 6,811 retrofits.
To register for a retrofit grant, eligible building owners may visit www.crmp.org/emr-retrofit-grant-program-ad-registration. To receive CRMP retrofit program email updates, such as registration information or when a program has expanded visit www.crmp.org/sign-up.
By Danny Jones