St. Paul's Seismic Design Category, explained

St. Paul carries Seismic Design Category A under USGS's ASCE 7-16 model. Lowest seismic design category. Building code requires no seismic-specific detailing here beyond ordinary construction practice. Nationally, St. Paul ranks above 4% of the 4,875 cities in this dataset for seismic hazard - the 4th percentile.

St. Paul by the numbers

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.022g, short-period spectral response 0.047g, 1-second spectral response 0.03g. Among 155 Minnesota cities in this dataset, St. Paul ranks 96 for seismic hazard, the 38th percentile within the state. About 307,465 people live in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Bracing and bolting: the actual cost

Outside California, no state-level retrofit grant equivalent to Brace + Bolt could be found for Minnesota. 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 St. Paul address.

More on how this number was built

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