Does Ypsilanti, MI need an earthquake retrofit?

Ypsilanti carries Seismic Design Category B under USGS's ASCE 7-16 model. 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 Ypsilanti sits at the 32th percentile for seismic hazard among 4,875 US cities.

How Ypsilanti compares

The raw figures: peak ground acceleration 0.053g, short-period spectral response 0.105g, 1-second spectral response 0.048g. Among 153 Michigan cities in this dataset, Ypsilanti ranks 30 for seismic hazard, the 81th percentile within the state. About 20,150 people live in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

What a retrofit costs in Ypsilanti

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

More on how this number was built

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