Seismic Retrofit Added 17% to the Resale Value of Older California Houses
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examined the resale prices of 217 recently sold California single-family dwellings built before 1960 to determine whether buyers value seismic retrofit. Of these, sellers indicated that 29 houses had been seismically retrofitted: 17 pre-1940 houses (when unanchored foundations and unbraced cripple walls were common) and 12 built between 1940 and 1959 (when unbraced cripple walls were common). A stepwise regression analysis indicates that in 2020 California home buyers paid 17% more for retrofitted pre-1940 houses. Buyers may have paid about 1% more for retrofitted 1940–1959 houses, but the correlation is weak. A higher resale price is a powerful incentive for people to invest in foundation bolts and cripple wall bracing. It reinforces findings by other researchers that natural hazard mitigation not only saves (by avoiding future losses), but it also pays (through higher resale value).
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it