A fault under the East Bay flatlands,
a 72 percent chance the USGS puts in writing, and
a FAIR Plan share that is eleven times higher in the hills than on the island.

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Start with the honest part: we are 350 miles south, not on Market Street

Bollinsure is an independent brokerage operating from Westlake Village, on the Ventura–Los Angeles county line. We do not have an office in San Francisco, Oakland or San Rafael, and a broker who fudges something that easy to check is telling you what the rest of the relationship will be like. We serve the Bay Area the way we serve Los Angeles, Sacramento, Santa Barbara, San Diego and the Inland Empire: you send a declarations page, a licensed broker reads it, and the conversation happens by phone or on a call, which is how most of this work has been done for years anyway.

Independent means we are not one carrier's agent. We place with admitted carriers, with non-admitted surplus lines markets through a licensed surplus line broker, and with the California FAIR Plan where the standard market has stopped writing. The nine counties that touch the bay — Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma, 101 cities by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's count — are more markets than that, and this page is about the four where the ground and the hills set the terms: San Francisco, Marin, Alameda and Contra Costa.

The city — the Marina, the Sunset, the Richmond, Noe Valley, the Mission — is housing the Census Bureau counts mostly as built before 1940, on fill, sand and rock, where the questions are the soft-story ordinance, the earthquake deductible and a dwelling limit on a 1910 flat that no one has re-estimated. The East Bay flats — Oakland, Alameda, Berkeley below the Hayward fault, El Cerrito — are where the fault runs under the streets. The hills — Montclair, Rockridge, the Berkeley Hills, Piedmont, Orinda, Lafayette, Moraga — burned in 1991 and carry the FAIR Plan shares. And Marin — Mill Valley, San Rafael, Fairfax, Greenbrae, Sausalito, Tiburon — is wildland-urban interface on the San Andreas side of the bay with the highest county median on this site.

Each of those is a different product to a carrier. A Marina flat, a West Oakland Victorian, a Montclair hillside house and a Mill Valley redwood lot are not variations on one policy; they are placed in different markets, priced off different maps and excluded in different ways. That is why the address on our letterhead matters less than the range of markets behind it.

The Hayward fault runs under the foundations, and the USGS puts the odds in writing

The U.S. Geological Survey's fact sheet on the third Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast states a 72 percent probability of at least one earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or greater striking somewhere in the San Francisco Bay region before 2043; the same table gives 98 percent for magnitude 6.0, 51 percent for 7.0 and 20 percent for 7.5, and the survey's own FAQ, updated in February 2025, still prints 72, 51 and 20. The faults with the highest estimated probability of generating damaging earthquakes are named: the Hayward, Rodgers Creek, Calaveras and San Andreas, with 33 percent for the Hayward or Rodgers Creek faults and 22 percent along the San Andreas. We saw a 2026 blog quoting 74 percent; it is not a USGS page and we do not use it.

The Hayward fault is the one under the neighbourhoods. The survey's 2018 fact sheet on the 1868 earthquake puts its creep at about a fifth of an inch a year, limited to the top three miles, and says creep and small earthquakes account for only about one-third of the fault's long-term movement — the remaining two-thirds must be released in large earthquakes like 1868. Lienkaemper and colleagues traced creep over at least 66 kilometres of the fault's 82-kilometre length, about 13 of them under water. The 1868 Hayward earthquake — titled magnitude 6.8 by the survey, variously estimated between 6.8 and 7.0 — killed about 30 people in a Bay Area of roughly 260,000; Alameda County then held 24,000 residents and now holds more than 2.4 million. Paleoseismic trenching finds twelve earthquakes on the southern Hayward in 1,900 years, the last six at intervals of 95 to 183 years, averaging about 150. The survey's HayWired scenario — a hypothetical magnitude 7.0 on the Hayward with its epicentre beneath Oakland, rupturing about 52 miles — estimates 800 deaths and 18,000 nonfatal injuries from shaking and liquefaction (its engineering volume gives 800 and 16,000 from shaking alone; we quote both), property damage and direct business-interruption losses of more than $82 billion in 2016 dollars, about 77,000 households displaced by the mainshock and as many as 152,000 with utility outages, and East Bay residents without water for six weeks and some for six months. It notes the fault runs beneath the foundations of more than 300 buildings, and that even if every building met current code, 0.4 percent could collapse and 5 percent would be unsafe to occupy.

The Bay Area has had the rehearsal. On 17 October 1989 the Loma Prieta earthquake — magnitude 6.9 on the survey's event page and fact sheet, surface-wave magnitude about 7.1 in its Professional Paper 1551, and we quote both — killed 63 people, injured more than 3,757 and did damage the paper puts above $5.9 billion and the event page at $6 billion, devastating parts of Oakland and San Francisco more than 50 miles from the rupture: 41 deaths on the Cypress Street viaduct, one on the Bay Bridge, and the Marina District at intensity IX, where liquefaction of sand and 1906 rubble fill destroyed 35 buildings in the California Geological Survey's account. Liquefaction at 134 locations accounted for $99.2 million of the total.

A homeowners policy excludes earth movement. Earthquake coverage in California is a separate policy or endorsement, most often through the California Earthquake Authority through your existing carrier, with a deductible expressed as a percentage of the dwelling limit that you choose. The Authority reports that it writes slightly over 62 percent of the state's residential earthquake market, that statewide take-up in 2024 was 12.48 percent of residential policies and 14.94 percent of homeowners, and that it insured 973,972 households as of 31 October 2025; it prints no Bay Area figure, so we quote none. Whether the premium is worth it here is a different arithmetic from Sacramento's: a 1910 flat on fill in the Marina, a soft-story building in the Mission, a 1960s house on the Hayward's trace in Berkeley and a renter in a West Oakland Victorian are four different questions, and we read which one you are before we answer.

Three cities made soft-story retrofits mandatory, and the ordinances say who

The buildings Loma Prieta taught the region to fear are wood-frame apartment houses with open ground floors — garages, storefronts, tuck-under parking — and three Bay Area cities have made their retrofit mandatory. San Francisco's Ordinance 66-13, signed 18 April 2013 and operative 17 June 2013, applies to wood-frame buildings of three or more stories, or two stories over a basement, with five or more dwelling units and a construction permit applied for before 1 January 1978; its findings counted approximately 4,300 such buildings, at least 2,800 that may have a weak-story condition, about 58,000 residents in the 2,800 with the largest openings and close to 2,000 businesses with about 7,000 people. Oakland's Ordinance 13516, effective 22 January 2019, made the retrofit mandatory after a 2009 ordinance had required information only. Berkeley's Chapter 19.39, Ordinance 7318-NS of 2013 on a 2005 base, covers wood-frame residential buildings of five or more units permitted before 1978, following a 1996 survey that found nearly 400 of them. Los Angeles followed with Ordinance 183893, effective 22 November 2015, for contrast.

For an owner the ordinances are a construction cost; for a policy they are three questions. Whether a retrofit has been completed changes what an earthquake underwriter will write and at what deductible. Whether the building is a landlord's (a DP-3 or commercial property form, with loss of rents) or owner-occupied changes the form entirely. And whether the ground-floor commercial tenant carries its own coverage, and names the owner, is the question most mixed-use declarations pages we read from the Mission and the Richmond District have never been asked. We read the retrofit status, the form and the tenant's certificate together.

October 1991 above Oakland, and the fires the record puts elsewhere

CAL FIRE's list of the twenty most destructive fires in California history, dated 9 October 2025, ranks the Tunnel Fire in the Oakland Hills fifth: October 1991, Alameda County, 1,600 acres, 2,900 structures, 25 deaths, cause rekindle. It is the smallest fire on the list by a wide margin and it destroyed more homes than any Southern California fire before 2003. Everything about the hills' insurance market follows from it. The fires that circulate in Bay Area conversation since belong to other counties, and we name them as CAL FIRE does: the 2017 Tubbs Fire is Napa and Sonoma, 36,807 acres, 5,636 structures, 22 deaths, fourth on the same list; the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex is Santa Cruz and San Mateo, 86,509 acres, 1,490 structures destroyed, one death; the 2020 SCU Lightning Complex, 396,624 acres, lists five counties in its header — Santa Clara, San Joaquin, Contra Costa, Alameda and Stanislaus — and Merced in its location line, with 225 structures destroyed. The 2026 Little Fire near Sunol in Alameda County burned 1,007 acres in July with one firefighter injury and no structure count on the record; the Norton, Deer and Morgan fires in Contra Costa the same year appear only as archive rows of 48 to 55 acres. We opened no 2024 or 2025 record with structures lost in Marin, Alameda or Contra Costa, so we claim none.

The maps changed anyway. On 24 February 2025, in the second of four phases, the Office of the State Fire Marshal released its recommended Fire Hazard Severity Zone maps for the Local Responsibility Area in all nine Bay Area counties, and its acre table prints the new zones city by city: Berkeley 454 acres Very High (against 1,269 in 2011), Oakland 1,945 (against 10,838 in 2011), Mill Valley 804, San Francisco 166, San Rafael 3,460 Moderate and 1,642 High, Fairfax 879 and 461. We did not open the numbered adoption ordinances for San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Mill Valley, San Rafael, Orinda or Lafayette, so we do not quote them. What the map changes is the rebuild, not the premium: a home inside a Very High zone that burns is rebuilt under Chapter 7A of the building code, and the line on your declarations page that pays for that difference is Ordinance and Law. In Montclair, the Berkeley Hills and the Marin canyons it is the first thing we read.

There is no non-renewal freeze in this market. Insurance Code section 675.1 lets the Commissioner pause non-renewals for a year in ZIP codes near a declared fire; the Department of Insurance's 2018–2026 bulletins carry two that once touched these counties — Bulletin 2020-1 for the Sky and Glen Cove fires in Solano and Contra Costa, and Bulletin 2020-11 for the 2020 complexes — and both expired years ago. No 2024, 2025 or 2026 bulletin names Marin, Alameda, Contra Costa or San Francisco. If a non-renewal letter arrives in Orinda or Mill Valley, the date on it is the deadline; our non-renewal guide walks the letter itself.

Eleven times higher in the hills than on the island, by the state's own count

The California FAIR Plan's county-by-county table puts Contra Costa County at 12,837 policies in force across its residential, commercial and business-owner lines as of 30 September 2025, up 96 percent in a year from 6,541 — and 1,993 the year before that; Alameda County at 11,694, up 73 percent from 6,774; Marin County at 4,361, up 51 percent from 2,885; and San Francisco at 2,382, up 76 percent from 1,353, against 642,010 statewide. Those are small counties in the plan's table and they are the fastest-growing rows on this site. The Department of Insurance's 2022 table of residential dwellings by ZIP shows where the growth started — the share of dwellings the FAIR Plan insured that year:

• Oakland (94611, Montclair and the hills) — 8.9 percent
• Berkeley (94708, the hills) — 3.0 percent
• Orinda (94563) — 2.9 percent
• Mill Valley (94941) — 2.7 percent
• Lafayette (94549) — 1.7 percent
• Fairfax (94930) — 1.7 percent
• San Francisco (94110, the Mission) — 1.0 percent
• Alameda (94501, the island) — 0.8 percent
• Moraga (94556) — 0.5 percent
• El Cerrito (94530) — 0.4 percent
• Oakland (94618, Rockridge) — 0.2 percent

Those figures are from 2022, before the county tables doubled, so the hill shares today are not lower. Montclair at 8.9 percent and Alameda island at 0.8 percent are eight miles apart and, to a carrier, different planets.

What the FAIR Plan is, and is not, decides how you buy it. It is a fire policy: fire, lightning, internal explosion, with optional extensions, written to a residential ceiling that our FAIR Plan page states as $3 million at one location under Division I — a number a great many Marin and Piedmont homes are above, which makes the placement a surplus lines conversation. It is not a homeowners policy. There is no liability, no theft, no water damage, no loss of use in the plan itself; those come from a separate Difference in Conditions policy that wraps around it. And it is not earthquake coverage either: a hill house on the FAIR Plan with a DIC companion is still uninsured for the Hayward fault until a third policy is bought. When we review a Montclair or Mill Valley declarations page, the DIC is the second document we ask for and the earthquake policy the third, and the absence of one or both is the most common finding.

The bay is rising, the port is moving 2.25 million boxes, and the medians start at $873,100

The Bay Conservation and Development Commission plans against the state's 2024 sea-level guidance: 0.8 feet by 2050, and 3.1, 4.9 or 6.6 feet by 2100 on its intermediate, intermediate-high and high scenarios, each with a 100-year storm surge about 3.5 feet on top. The Geological Survey's 2025 modelling finds local measures can reduce flood risk under about one metre of rise and regional ones are needed between one and one and a half. For a policy the arithmetic is the same as Sacramento's: a homeowners form excludes flood, a flood policy is a separate purchase whether or not a lender asks, and along the Alameda shoreline, in Mission Bay and on the Marin bayfront the question belongs in the review now, not after a king tide.

The commercial side of the region is real and specific. The Port of Oakland closed 2025 at 2,253,976 twenty-foot-equivalent units, an even import-export split, against 2,262,921 in 2024, and describes itself as supporting more than 98,000 regional jobs. UCSF counts 42,725 people in its fall 2025 data and calls itself the second-largest employer in San Francisco. The owner of a Rockridge home is often also a contractor, a physician with a practice, a landlord of a soft-story building or a business with goods moving through the port, and those are commercial placements — property, general liability, workers' compensation, inland marine for goods in transit or on someone else's floor, professional liability — with their own carriers and forms, handled in the same review.

The housing carries the medians the Census Bureau's 2024 one-year survey prints: owner-occupied values of $1,547,000 in Marin, $1,314,700 in San Francisco, $1,090,600 in Alameda and $873,100 in Contra Costa, with 371,841 households in the city, 612,675 in Alameda and 417,686 in Contra Costa. The 2020–2024 five-year survey counts 187,447 San Francisco housing units built in 1939 or earlier, against 4,527 built since 2020, and 224,913 renter-occupied homes to 139,057 owner-occupied; we quote the counts and do not compute a rate the Census did not print. Two things follow. For owners, the number on the declarations page is often a purchase price or a builder's figure from years ago, and on a 1910 flat the dwelling limit and its extended replacement cost percentage decide whether a rebuild under today's code is funded. For the renting majority of the city, an HO-4 renter's policy with an earthquake endorsement is the most under-bought coverage in the region, and after a HayWired morning it is the difference between a hotel bill and a claim.

What a coverage review actually is

You send a declarations page — and if you carry an earthquake policy, that one; if you are on the FAIR Plan, the Difference in Conditions declarations too; if you own a soft-story building, the retrofit status and the tenant's certificate; if you run a practice or move goods, the business policies. A licensed broker reads them and tells you what they do: the dwelling limit against a current single-lot rebuild estimate, what your earthquake deductible would cost you on the day, how your earth-movement and water exclusions are worded, what your Ordinance and Law and extended replacement cost mean under a 2025 hazard map, whether a FAIR Plan policy has the companion it needs, whether a flood policy belongs on the bayfront, and whether you are in the market you should be in. There is no fee and no obligation, and the commission we would earn is printed on any quote we send. If your current policy is doing the job, the honest answer is that it is doing the job — that is a common outcome, and we would rather say it than manufacture a reason to move you.

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