SB 721 Compliance & Balcony Repair for Redwood City Commercial Properties

Climate considerations in Redwood City

This is the only city we write about whose official municipal slogan is a weather claim, and it is worth telling the story properly because the punchline matters. In 1925 the Chamber of Commerce and the Real Estate Board ran a contest for a slogan; Wilbur H. Doxsee won ten dollars for "By Government Test, Our Climate is Best", shortened to what is on the arches today. Doxsee was the Chamber's own president. The historical marker downtown concedes that the origin of the test is uncertain; the leading theory involves German consular agents in 1912, and the local historian's view is that Doxsee essentially made it up, borrowing from a friend named Henry Finkler who cycled around the hills recording temperatures and rainfall for his own amusement and concluded that the world had exactly three perfect climates – the Canary Islands, the Mediterranean coast of Africa, and everything within twenty miles of Redwood City. Now the awkward part: he was not wrong. The National Weather Service, which keeps both a forecast centre and a cooperative office in this city, records the normal annual precipitation at 20.56 inches, an average of 21.6 days a year with highs at or above 90°F, 2.8 days at or above 100°F, and 1.8 nights at or below freezing. For comparison, the valley cities we also work in run 65 to 82 days over 90°F and up to thirty nights below freezing. Redwood City genuinely is mild. And that is precisely the problem on this page. Twenty inches of rain a year is not a small amount of water – it is more than Sacramento gets. The climate is Csb, warm-summer, which means the summers never get hot enough to dry a framing cavity out properly. So the moisture is here and the drying is not, and decay proceeds exactly as it would anywhere – except that nothing dramatic ever happens to prompt anybody to check. There is no January the roof came off, no August the coating split. There is just twenty inches a year, every year, and a building that never complains.

Common building stock we work on

Redwood City incorporated in 1867 – the first city in San Mateo County and the oldest on the Peninsula – and has been the county seat since the county was created in 1856. It started as a lumber port on Redwood Creek and still runs the only deepwater port on the bay south of San Francisco. Downtown carries that history; the county's 1910 courthouse is now the history museum. The other half of the city is a different proposition entirely. Redwood Shores, out past Highway 101, is roughly two thousand acres of former tidal marsh that the Leslie Salt Company diked in 1928 and used as salt brine evaporation ponds, then built out as a master-planned waterfront community from the 1970s. It is a large body of condominium and association stock on made ground behind earthen dikes, and it is SB 326 Inspection territory on the nine-year cycle. Between the two sits the ordinary rental stock of a Peninsula city – Friendly Acres, Woodside Plaza, Centennial, Stambaugh-Heller – which is SB 721 Inspection on six. Different eras, different ground, same statute, and one thing in common: none of it has ever been through a weather event severe enough to make anyone open it up.

Neighborhoods served

Downtown, Broadway, Centennial, Stambaugh-Heller, Edgewood, Mount Carmel, Central, Palm, Canyon, Eagle Hill, Roosevelt, Woodside Plaza, Farm Hills, Friendly Acres, Redwood Village, Redwood Oaks, and Redwood Shores. ZIP codes 94061, 94062, 94063 and 94065.

What we typically see

In Redwood City we most often address: (1) decay that has taken thirty years to get where it is, because a mild climate does not stop rot – it only stops the rot from being interesting; (2) buildings whose owners have mistaken an absence of incidents for evidence of soundness, which is the single most common reasoning error we meet in this city and the hardest to argue with, because on the surface it looks like a track record; (3) first-generation membranes on Redwood Shores stock now decades into service on made ground, where the base of a post and the underside of a connection deserve looking at before the walking surface does; (4) nothing at all on the surface – no stain, no sag, no tell – which is why in a city where the weather will never do it for you, Annual Maintenance Plans and a scheduled look are the only mechanism that exists. See our Inspections page for what that actually involves.