Does Alamo Heights, TX need an earthquake retrofit?

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Alamo Heights in Seismic Design Category A: Lowest seismic design category. Building code requires no seismic-specific detailing here beyond ordinary construction practice. That puts Alamo Heights in the 6th percentile nationally for seismic hazard - higher than 6% of the 4,875 US cities USGS was checked against here.

Where Alamo Heights sits in Texas

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.024g, short-period spectral response 0.05g, 1-second spectral response 0.023g. Among 384 Texas cities in this dataset, Alamo Heights ranks 341 for seismic hazard, the 11th percentile within the state. About 7,557 people live in Alamo Heights, Texas.

What a retrofit costs in Alamo Heights

Outside California, no state-level retrofit grant equivalent to Brace + Bolt could be found for Texas. A typical retrofit still runs $5,000-$10,000 nationally, about $7,000 for a common single-family job.

Insuring against this, not just retrofitting

Outside California, earthquake coverage is typically sold as an endorsement added to a standard homeowners policy, not a separate product - worth asking about directly when getting a home-insurance quote for a Alamo Heights address.

More on how this number was built

The methodology guide covers exactly how USGS's public design-maps API produced Alamo Heights's numbers. The guide to what a Seismic Design Category actually means covers why a category is never a substitute for an engineer's assessment of one specific house.