SB 721 Compliance & Balcony Repair for Daly City Commercial Properties

Climate considerations in Daly City

Everyone knows Daly City is foggy. Almost nobody knows the two facts that make that worth acting on. The first is agricultural. After an 1853 government survey opened this land to settlement, mainly Irish farmers took up ranches across what is now Westlake and Serramonte. Within about a decade several families had abandoned them, because the fog density here killed their grain and potato crops. The families who remained gave up arable farming and switched to dairy and cattle – a fog that ends a wheat crop does not bother grass. The second is commercial. In 1945 Henry Doelger bought 1,350 acres of pig farms and cabbage patches on the bluffs above the Pacific, and the real estate agents of the day advised him against it, on the grounds that he would be building housing in what the trade called the Fog Gap. He ignored them and built Westlake between 1948 and 1962 – one of the largest private housing developments in California in the 1950s. Put those together and the situation is plain. This city sits in the place the fog comes through, densely enough that within living memory it decided what could and could not be grown here, and then it was comprehensively built on. A wood assembly needs to dry to survive, the Peninsula's warm-summer climate never gets hot enough to help it, and Daly City removes what little help the rest of the Peninsula gets. Grass does not mind the fog. Wood does, every day, for as long as it stands.

Common building stock we work on

Daly City was founded by refugees. On 18 April 1906 the earthquake struck just off the coast near Mussel Rock, and San Franciscans who lost their homes to the quake and the fire came south to camp on the ranches – among them the 250 acres John Daly had built up from a dairy job he took in 1853. Daly and the other farmers gave them milk. Then Daly subdivided, the refugees stayed, the tracts followed, and in 1911 the place incorporated as a city by a margin of 132 votes to 130. It stayed small until Doelger arrived. Westlake is what most of this city physically is: monostylistic architecture designed by one core team to cover nearly every building in the development, on lots of about 3,300 square feet where the rest of the Peninsula runs 5,000 or more, built so efficiently that Doelger was called the Henry Ford of housing. About 40% of Daly City's housing stock was built before 1950. That is the number to sit with. Four in ten buildings here are older than the fog-gap subdivision that made the city famous, and all of them have spent every year since in the same air. The pre-war and Westlake-era stock is Renovation & Remodel work rather than replacement, and the rental inventory across all of it is SB 721 Inspection territory on the six-year cycle.

Neighborhoods served

Westlake, Serramonte, St. Francis Heights, Top of the Hill, Original Daly City, Hillside, Crocker, Southern Hills, Vista Grande, Bayshore, Skyline, and the Mission Street and John Daly Boulevard corridors. ZIP codes 94014 and 94015.

What we typically see

In Daly City we most often address: (1) decay with a completely clean surface, which is the signature condition of a place that never dries – staining and softening are products of wetting and drying cycles, and an assembly that is simply damp most of the time produces neither while the framing goes; (2) wall junctions rather than walking surfaces, because in this air the moisture is ambient rather than falling, so it arrives at the connection from every direction and a recoat of the deck addresses none of it; (3) sealant and coatings that were applied in the wrong month and never cured properly – a real and avoidable problem here, and about half the failed repairs we are asked to look at failed on the calendar rather than the specification; (4) guards on pre-1950 stock whose fixings predate every current requirement and have spent seventy-five years in this – Railing Repair & Replacement at the fixing, not the picket. Because nothing in this climate will ever force the issue, Annual Maintenance Plans are the only mechanism that puts anyone under the building on a schedule.