[CASE FILE ITEM: Newspaper clipping, San Jose Mercury News business section profile, published March 14, 2018.]
San Mateo Daily Journal Local & Community News March 14, 2021
Local Inspector Keeps History Standing#
Local firm founder’s attention to detail saves historic Broadway home from demolition#
By Patricia Orosco, Staff Writer
REDWOOD CITY - When the Kleinman family learned their 1923 Craftsman bungalow on Broadway needed $85,000 in seismic retrofitting, they briefly considered selling. The home had been in the family for three generations, but the engineering report was thirty-seven pages of structural red flags, and the bids they received all exceeded six figures.
Then Jeff Matthers called.
Matthers, 43, is the founder and lead inspector of Matthers Seismic, a Redwood City-based firm that contracts with the city’s Building Safety Division for seismic retrofit assessments. He’d reviewed the initial engineering assessment and noticed something the private engineers had missed: the home’s foundation bolting was already partially compliant with current code, installed during a 1989 upgrade after the Loma Prieta earthquake.
“He showed up with a clipboard and a flashlight and spent two hours in our crawl space,” said homeowner Diane Kleinman, 67. “Most inspectors are in and out in twenty minutes. Jeff mapped every anchor bolt, every shear wall, every connection point. He found that we were already seventy percent of the way there.”
Matthers’s revised assessment reduced the retrofit scope - and cost - by more than half. The Kleinmans kept the house.
“It’s not about cutting corners,” Matthers explained during a recent interview at City Hall. “It’s about accurate measurement. A lot of older homes have hidden compliance. They were built better than people think, or they’ve been incrementally upgraded over decades. If you don’t look carefully, you assume the worst.”
Matthers founded Matthers Seismic twelve years ago after developing a proprietary seismic risk assessment methodology that local engineers call “the crystal ball.” The firm holds contracts with Redwood City, San Mateo County, and several private developers. Before starting the company, he worked as a field inspector for a structural engineering firm in San Jose. He holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from San Jose State University and is a certified ICC building inspector.
His colleagues describe him as meticulous.
“Jeff is the guy who finds the thing everyone else missed,” said Tom Gearhart, a senior engineer at the firm. “He’ll spend an extra hour in a crawl space if that’s what it takes to get the measurement right. It saves homeowners money and it saves the city from liability. That’s the job.”
Matthers also volunteers at the Redwood City Public Library’s North Branch Makerspace, where he teaches occasional workshops on basic home inspection and safety. The workshops are free and draw mostly first-time homeowners and renters trying to understand their lease obligations.
“People don’t know what to look for,” Matthers said. “A cracked foundation isn’t always structural. A sagging beam isn’t always load-bearing. I just show them how to measure and document. The rest is arithmetic.”
The Kleinman home is one of more than 140 properties Matthers has inspected in Redwood City since 2013. According to city records, his firm’s revision rate - cases where an initial engineering assessment is revised downward after independent review - is the highest among contracted inspectors.
“That house has my grandmother’s name on the deed,” Kleinman said. “If it weren’t for Jeff, we’d have lost it.”
The Craftsman bungalow is now listed on the city’s Historic Resource Inventory. The retrofit work was completed in December 2018. The family plans to stay.
Patricia Orosco covers local government and community affairs for the San Mateo Daily Journal. She can be reached at porosco@smdailyjournal.com.