Does Fair Lawn, NJ need an earthquake retrofit?

USGS's ASCE 7-16 seismic design model - the same standard building codes use - places Fair Lawn in Seismic Design Category B: Low seismic hazard. Code requires basic seismic detailing (bracing, connections) but no special structural system restrictions. Rank it against the rest of the country and Fair Lawn sits at the 66th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

How Fair Lawn compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.182g, short-period spectral response 0.294g, 1-second spectral response 0.061g. Among 194 New Jersey cities in this dataset, Fair Lawn ranks 32 for seismic hazard, the 84th percentile within the state. About 36,489 people live in Fair Lawn, New Jersey.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

Outside California, no state-level retrofit grant equivalent to Brace + Bolt could be found for New Jersey. 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 Fair Lawn address.

More on how this number was built

The methodology guide covers exactly how USGS's public design-maps API produced Fair Lawn'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.