San Francisco Breaking Down Silos to Plan for Resilience

Resilience work takes both the broad and the long view, uniting city systems to create a recovery plan for disasters over the next hundred years. "Most cities do [emergency] response really well, but start to see problems in the transition to recovery," Otellini tells The Planning Report.

Hence his interest in the housing market. One of San Francisco's major resilience goals is ensuring that interim transitional housing is available after a disaster—especially for renters, who Otellini says make up 70 percent of the city. "The faster we’re able to get people back into their homes after a disaster, the faster we will kickstart the recovery," he explains.

That approach is borne of sad experience. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake devastated the city and put stress on housing and infrastructure, even though, Otellini says, it was only a moderate earthquake.

The city took ten years to develop a comprehensive, community-driven plan for seismic safety that would take 30 years to complete. And recognizing the shared vulnerability of the Bay Area, San Francisco recently issued guidelines requiring all capital-planning projects to incorporate an analysis of regional sea-level rise.

Collaboration is central to resilience planning by nature. The Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities program connects CROs around the world, creating a network where experts of different backgrounds (Otellini is also director of earthquake safety) can "fill in each other’s gaps." And in many cities, part of a CRO's job is connecting the dots between independent city projects to create an integrated recovery plan. Otellini’s position isn't housed in a particular department but reports directly to the mayor, allowing him to be a "conduit" between departments:

"Previously, factions concerned about seismic vulnerabilities didn’t talk to folks worried about sea-level rise. Neither talked to the private sector…or to transportation providers. We’re identifying everyone’s specific issues and saying we want to come up with a grand solution that helps all of these interdependencies."