The question that stops more soft-story retrofit projects before they start than any other is not about steel or engineering or permits. It is about the people living in the building.

What happens to my tenants during the retrofit? Do they have to leave? For how long? Who pays for that? What are my legal obligations? And what happens to my relationship with tenants I've had for ten years if I put them through a construction process that disrupts their lives for months?

These are the questions that sit between a property owner and a signed retrofit contract — and they are questions that most contractors are poorly equipped to answer, because most contractors think about retrofits as structural projects rather than occupied-building management challenges. The steel gets installed either way. The tenant experience during installation is someone else's problem.

At SKS, the tenant experience during a retrofit is not someone else's problem. It is a project management challenge that we have been solving on occupied multifamily buildings across Los Angeles since the retrofit ordinance was enacted — and solving it well is a direct differentiator in a market where the owners who have the most anxiety about the tenant disruption question are the owners with the longest-tenured, most valued tenant relationships.

Here is what California law requires during a soft-story retrofit, what good contractors do beyond the legal minimum, and how SKS approaches occupied-building retrofits in a way that protects the owner's tenant relationships as carefully as it protects the owner's structural liability.

The Legal Framework — What California Law Actually Requires

The legal obligations of a property owner during a construction project on an occupied residential building are established by California Civil Code, the Los Angeles Municipal Code, and in rent-controlled buildings, the Los Angeles Rent Stabilization Ordinance. Understanding which framework applies — and what it actually requires — is the foundation of responsible retrofit project planning.

Habitability Maintenance

California Civil Code Section 1941 imposes an affirmative obligation on landlords to maintain residential rental units in a habitable condition throughout the tenancy. Habitability is not suspended during a construction project — even a mandatory one, even one ordered by the city. The landlord must take reasonable steps to maintain habitable conditions throughout the retrofit process.

What habitability requires during a retrofit: tenants must have uninterrupted access to their units except during specifically scheduled work periods with proper advance notice. Common area facilities — laundry, parking, building entry — must remain accessible or alternative arrangements must be provided. Utilities must not be interrupted without advance notice and must be restored within a reasonable time after any necessary interruption. The building must remain weathertight during the work, with temporary weatherproofing installed where work involves penetrating exterior assemblies.

A retrofit that creates habitability conditions — through prolonged utility interruption, loss of unit access, loss of parking without alternative, or sustained construction conditions that make the units uninhabitable — gives tenants the basis for rent withholding, rent reduction, or in extreme cases constructive eviction claims. These are not theoretical risks — they are the documented consequences of retrofit projects that were managed without attention to the tenant experience.

Notice Requirements

California law requires landlords to provide tenants with advance notice before entering a residential unit for construction or inspection purposes. Civil Code Section 1954 establishes the general notice requirement: at least 24 hours written notice before entering a unit for repairs or construction, during normal business hours, unless the tenant consents to a different arrangement or an emergency exists.

For soft-story retrofits, the 24-hour notice requirement applies to any work that requires entry into an individual unit — which is most diaphragm connection work and any work on unit subpanels or unit-specific electrical systems. Work confined to the parking garage level and common areas does not technically require unit entry notice — but best practice is to provide advance notice of all construction activity, including garage-level work, because the construction noise and parking disruption affect tenants regardless of whether the crew enters their unit.

For RSO-covered buildings in Los Angeles, the Rent Stabilization Ordinance imposes additional notice requirements for construction activity — and the RSO's tenant notification provisions are more specific than the general Civil Code requirements. Property owners with RSO-covered buildings should review the specific RSO construction notice requirements with their property management attorney before the project begins.

Temporary Relocation Requirements

This is the provision that generates the most owner anxiety — and the most misunderstanding about when it actually applies.

California law and the Los Angeles RSO require temporary relocation assistance — and in some cases temporary relocation — when construction activity renders a unit temporarily uninhabitable. The trigger is not construction activity in the building. It is construction activity that makes a specific unit uninhabitable for a period of time.

A soft-story retrofit that is performed entirely in the parking garage, without entry into residential units, without utility interruption to units, and without work that affects the habitability of the units above — which describes the majority of properly planned soft-story retrofits — does not trigger the temporary relocation requirement for residential tenants.

A retrofit that requires entry into units for diaphragm connection work or electrical panel work may trigger temporary relocation obligations for the affected units — but only if the unit entry work creates uninhabitable conditions during the work period, not merely because the work requires access to the unit.

The specific relocation requirements when they are triggered: the Los Angeles RSO requires the owner to pay relocation assistance costs for tenants who must vacate due to construction — typically the actual cost of comparable temporary housing for the displacement period, or a defined per-day amount established by the RSO. The RSO also imposes notice requirements for temporary displacement: at least 30 days advance written notice when the displacement period will exceed seven days, and a right of return to the unit at the conclusion of the displacement.

Understanding precisely when the relocation requirement is triggered — and structuring the retrofit work sequence to minimize triggering it — is the project management challenge that separates contractors who think about occupied-building retrofits from contractors who treat occupied buildings the same as vacant ones.

What Good Contractors Do Beyond the Legal Minimum

Legal compliance is the floor, not the ceiling, of responsible tenant management during a retrofit. The property owners who protect their tenant relationships through a retrofit process — who complete the project without lease terminations, without rent withholding disputes, and without the long-term relationship damage that construction trauma produces — are the owners whose contractors went beyond the legal minimum.

Here is what good retrofit management looks like in practice:

Pre-Construction Tenant Communication

Before a single drill bit touches the concrete in the parking garage, every tenant in the building should receive a written communication that explains the retrofit — what it is, why it is happening, what work will be performed, what the timeline looks like, what access to common areas will be affected, and who the contact person is for construction-related questions or concerns.

This communication is not legally required. It is the difference between tenants who are anxious observers of an unexplained process and tenants who are informed participants in a building improvement they understand and can plan around. The tenant who received advance notice of the retrofit timeline — who knows that parking will be affected on certain days, that there will be drilling noise in the garage on specific mornings, that the work will be complete by a specific date — is a fundamentally different tenant relationship than the one who woke up to drilling and dust without warning.

SKS provides a tenant communication package to every property owner at the start of the retrofit project — a written notification drafted in plain language, in English and Spanish, that explains the project in terms tenants can understand and act on. This is not a legal notice. It is a relationship management tool.

Construction Scheduling Around Tenant Routines

The loudest phases of a soft-story retrofit — anchor bolt drilling, concrete cutting, steel delivery and positioning — are discretionary in their scheduling within the construction sequence. A contractor who schedules these operations for 7 AM on weekdays without regard for the tenant population above is meeting the legal noise ordinance minimum. A contractor who schedules them after the morning rush, avoids Saturday work when tenants are home, and coordinates with the property manager to avoid the worst scheduling conflicts is managing the tenant relationship.

The construction schedule for a soft-story retrofit has flexibility that a good contractor uses to minimize tenant disruption. Drilling operations can be scheduled in blocks that concentrate the noise in shorter, more predictable periods rather than spreading it across weeks of low-level continuous disruption. Steel installation, which requires crane access that affects parking, can be scheduled on days when the property manager has confirmed lowest parking utilization. Utility shutdowns — required for certain connections to unit electrical systems — can be scheduled for the narrowest possible windows during off-peak hours.

None of this requires the contractor to absorb additional cost. It requires the contractor to manage the construction sequence with tenant impact as a variable, not an afterthought.

Parking Management During Construction

Parking displacement during a soft-story retrofit is the tenant impact that generates the most sustained frustration — because it affects every tenant, every day, for the duration of the project. The parking garage is the work site. Spaces are blocked by material storage, equipment staging, and crew access. Tenants who depend on their parking spaces for their daily routines are affected from the first day of construction to the last.

Good retrofit management addresses the parking impact proactively: identifying the minimum parking displacement required at each stage of the work, coordinating with the property manager to communicate parking changes to tenants in advance, providing alternative parking arrangements where feasible, and restoring parking access as quickly as the construction sequence allows.

For RSO-covered buildings where parking is a lease-covered amenity, displacement of a tenant's parking space may have rent implications — parking is a service that the lease commits the owner to provide, and a sustained inability to provide it gives the tenant grounds for rent reduction. Managing the parking impact carefully is not just a tenant relations decision — it is a financial decision.

Dust and Debris Control

Anchor bolt drilling and concrete cutting generate concrete dust. Steel fabrication and welding generate metal particulate and fumes. Wood cutting generates sawdust. In a parking garage that is directly below occupied residential units, all of this material finds its way into the building through every gap, penetration, and ventilation path in the floor-ceiling assembly.

Dust control measures — plastic sheeting barriers, HEPA-filtered air scrubbers, wet-cutting techniques for concrete — are not legally required on most soft-story retrofit projects. They are required by any contractor who takes the tenant experience seriously. The tenant who finds concrete dust on the surfaces in their unit, or who smells welding fumes in their apartment, is not going to read the retrofit construction notice that explained the project. They are going to call the property manager with a complaint, and the complaint is legitimate.

SKS's standard retrofit construction protocols include dust barriers at the garage-to-building transitions and wet-cutting for anchor bolt drilling — not because we are required to, but because the tenant above the work is a real person whose home we are temporarily disrupting, and managing that disruption responsibly is part of the project.

The Work Sequence That Minimizes Tenant Impact

The structural sequence of a soft-story retrofit is not fixed. Within the engineering requirements — the order in which elements must be installed to maintain structural integrity during construction — there is flexibility in how the work is phased and scheduled. That flexibility can be used to minimize tenant impact or ignored in favor of pure construction efficiency.

SKS's standard retrofit sequencing for occupied buildings prioritizes the following:

Confine garage-level work to the garage level. The moment frames, anchor bolts, shear walls, and hold-down hardware can be completed without any entry into residential units on most soft-story building configurations. The diaphragm connection work — which requires access to the underside of the floor above — can in many cases be performed from above in the parking garage rather than from below in the residential units. When the structural design allows this approach, we use it.

Batch the unit-entry work. When diaphragm connections or other structural elements do require entry into residential units, batching the work unit by unit rather than spreading it across the building over weeks minimizes the total duration of disruption for each affected tenant. A tenant whose unit requires two days of access for structural work is less disrupted by two consecutive days of focused activity than by four non-consecutive half-days spread across two weeks.

Complete utility interruptions in a single window. Any electrical work that requires utility interruption to residential units should be completed in a single coordinated window — not in multiple partial-day interruptions. A four-hour utility interruption that is scheduled, communicated in advance, and completed as promised is a manageable disruption. Multiple unplanned interruptions of varying duration are a habitability concern and a property management crisis.

Restore parking access by end of each work day. Where the construction sequence allows it, we restore parking access at the end of each work day — even if material staging will resume the following morning. Tenants who can park overnight have their most significant daily inconvenience resolved, regardless of the daytime disruption.

The Ellis Act Risk — When Retrofit Becomes Relocation

For property owners with RSO-covered buildings who are considering using the retrofit as the occasion for a broader repositioning of the tenant base — through Ellis Act eviction, substantial rehabilitation proceedings, or other mechanisms that combine the construction project with tenant displacement — this post is not the appropriate resource for that analysis. Those are legal decisions that require qualified landlord-tenant counsel, and they involve regulatory frameworks — the Ellis Act, the LA RSO, the Just Cause for Eviction ordinance — that are well outside the construction firm's appropriate role.

What SKS can say is this: the soft-story retrofit does not require tenant relocation in the vast majority of cases. We have completed retrofits on occupied buildings of 4 to 50-plus units without triggering relocation requirements, without tenant disputes, and without lease terminations attributable to the construction process. The project can be managed in a way that preserves the tenant base and the tenant relationships — and for most property owners with valued long-term tenants, that outcome is the goal.

If a property owner has a specific situation — a tenant with accessibility needs that complicate construction access, a tenant with a known health condition that makes dust exposure a concern, a unit that is genuinely adjacent to work that will create temporary uninhabitable conditions — we will identify those situations in pre-construction planning and work with the property manager and the owner's attorney to address them appropriately.

What to Tell Your Tenants — and When

The tenant communication timeline for a soft-story retrofit should follow this sequence:

Thirty to sixty days before construction begins: a written notice to all tenants explaining the retrofit, the reason for it, the approximate timeline, and the general nature of the work. This notice establishes the context and gives tenants time to plan around the project.

Two weeks before construction begins: a more specific communication with the confirmed construction start date, the phases of work that will affect common areas and parking, the contact information for construction-related questions, and any specific requests for tenant cooperation during the project.

At least 24 hours before any unit entry: individual written notice to the specific tenant whose unit will be accessed, with the date, the nature of the work, the approximate duration, and the crew member who will be present.

At project completion: a written confirmation to all tenants that construction is complete, that the building has received its city sign-off, and that normal conditions have been fully restored. This completion notice closes the construction communication loop and signals the return to normal — which is the moment tenants have been waiting for.

SKS provides template communications for each of these phases as part of the project management package. The owner and property manager customize them for the specific building and tenant base. The content is informed by 39 years of occupied-building retrofit experience and by the specific legal requirements of the applicable tenant protection framework.

SKS and Occupied-Building Retrofit Management

SKS Construction has completed over 850 soft-story retrofits in Los Angeles — the majority of them on occupied multifamily buildings with active tenant populations. We understand that the building is not a construction site. It is someone's home. And the construction site that occupies the parking garage for six to eight weeks is a temporary intrusion into a permanent living environment that deserves to be managed accordingly.

Our project managers coordinate construction scheduling with property managers throughout the project. Our superintendents maintain the communication protocols that keep tenants informed and the property management team out of reactive mode. Our crews work within a site management standard that reflects the occupied building context — not the vacant building construction efficiency that most scheduling is built around.

Fixed-price bids. No subject-to-change clauses. Direct owner access to Shahab and Sam Shaolian. 39 years. 3,000-plus completed projects. 80% repeat clients. One firm that has managed the tenant relationship as carefully as the structural engineering on every occupied-building retrofit we've completed.

The steel in the garage protects the building. The project management protects the relationships that make the building work.

Get a FREE Retrofit Assessment — Including an Occupied-Building Management Plan

SKS Construction offers FREE soft-story retrofit assessments for multifamily property owners across Los Angeles, Burbank, Glendale, Torrance, Culver City, and Pasadena. Our assessment includes a structural evaluation, a fixed-price retrofit proposal, and a preliminary occupied-building management plan that addresses the tenant communication timeline, the parking displacement strategy, and the work sequencing approach for your specific building configuration and tenant profile.

The tenant disruption question has an answer. It is not "move everyone out." It is a project management plan that we have been refining across 850-plus occupied-building retrofits.

Call (818) 855-1181 or email info@sksconstruction.com to schedule your FREE assessment today.

The retrofit protects the building. Good project management protects everything else.