What are Soft Story Buildings? These are multi-level structures built with a first floor that is much less rigid (soft) than the floors above, such as in an apartment with tuck under parking. They can and have failed in significant seismic activity due to unreinforced openings on the ground floor which caused far more movement than the soft story building could withstand, resulting in the upper floors COLLAPSING on top of it. A huge project to soft story retrofit Los Angeles has begun to help prevent this from occurring in the future.