In 2016, AVELAR Senior Partner Lonnie Haughton published a foundational two-part history of the City and County of San Francisco’s Bureau of Building Inspection—the agency that eventually evolved into today’s Department of Building Inspection:
These articles explored the significant shifts in San Francisco’s regulatory framework and offered insight into the city’s evolution of construction oversight.
During World War II, local building activity was still governed by the 1934 Building Laws of San Francisco, themselves modeled after a much older set of regulations: the San Francisco Building Laws of 1910, adopted via Ordinance No. 1008 – New Series in December 1909.
Efforts to modernize these laws throughout the 1930s and early 1940s met with resistance. Many builders argued that adopting stricter standards would hinder economic recovery from the Great Depression, and later, slow wartime production, ultimately endangering national defense efforts.
It wasn’t until after the war that real reform took shape. In 1946, the city adopted an updated San Francisco Building Code, still largely based on outdated early 20th-century guidelines. At the same time, the Bureau of Building Inspection, then under the Department of Public Works, began the ambitious task of fully rewriting and modernizing the city’s Building, Electrical, Fire, and Plumbing & Heating Codes.
As part of our ongoing commitment to historical preservation and professional education, AVELAR is proud to release a curated archive of San Francisco’s construction codes, beginning with the 1946 San Francisco Building Code.
Stay tuned for the next installment in the series: the fully revised 1948 San Francisco Building Code, produced by the Bureau of Building Inspection.
