SB 721 Compliance & Balcony Repair for South San Francisco Commercial Properties

Climate considerations in South San Francisco

South San Francisco sits in the Colma Creek valley with San Bruno Mountain to the north and the Coast Range to the west, and its climate is described by one word rather than a number: wind. The microclimate here is dominated by wind off the Pacific, which keeps daytime temperatures cool year round even in summer. The city is on the cusp between fog and sun – some days the hills to the west carve the fog off before it arrives, other days it comes straight through and stays. Normal annual precipitation is 19.64 inches. Now the part that matters, and that no annual figure will ever show you. A rain gauge is a horizontal opening. It measures water falling vertically. It does not measure fog being driven at a wall – and driven fog deposits liquid water on a windward surface, which is the same mechanism that keeps a redwood forest alive on a rainless summer morning. So a west-facing elevation in this city is being wetted on days when the official precipitation for the day is zero, and the cool summers mean it never properly dries between one wetting and the next. The number on the page says 19.64 inches. The building has no idea what the number says. It only knows how often it is wet, and in South City the honest answer is: more than anyone is counting.

Common building stock we work on

This city was built on purpose, as a business. In 1890 the South San Francisco Land and Improvement Company acquired the land to lay out a town beside the packing plants; G. F. Swift of the Western Meat Company intended an industrial suburb modelled on South Chicago and South Omaha. The plan put industry east of the Southern Pacific tracks and housing west of them in a grid, and that division still describes the city. It incorporated in 1908 – specifically so it could build a smelter the county had refused to allow – and by the 1920s was the smokestack capital of the Peninsula, with 35 industrial operations running through the Depression. In 1923 the Chamber of Commerce whitewashed a slogan onto the hillside; concrete letters up to 65 feet tall followed in 1929, and the sign has been on the National Register since 1996. Here is a detail from that nomination worth sitting with: the letters were found intact except for the T in CITY, whose vertical had separated from its horizontal by about forty inches. Concrete, in the open, on a hill the whole city looks at every day – and it moved forty inches before anybody wrote it down. The housing is a similar story with lower stakes. The population went from 4,411 in 1920 to 66,105 today, most of it in postwar subdivisions on the slopes west of El Camino, and the Old Town grid is older still. That stock is SB 721 Inspection territory on six years, much of it never inspected, and the downtown fabric is Renovation & Remodel work rather than replacement.

Neighborhoods served

Downtown South San Francisco, Grand Avenue, Old Town, Sign Hill, Paradise Valley, Brentwood, Sunshine Gardens, Winston Serra, Westborough, Buri Buri, Avalon, Orange Park, Terrabay, Oyster Point, and the East of 101 district. ZIP code 94080.

What we typically see

In South San Francisco we most often address: (1) one elevation ruined and the opposite one sound – not from sun, from wind, and it is the windward side every time, which means we can usually tell an owner where to look before we open anything; (2) water arriving at the wall junction rather than on the deck, which is why a recoat of the walking surface on a west-facing balcony here changes nothing and why we scope flashing before membrane; (3) an assembly that is wet far more often than the rainfall suggests and dry far less often than the sunshine suggests, in a city whose summers never get warm enough to finish the job; (4) buildings nobody has ever had a reason to open, because the water never announced itself with a ceiling stain – which is why in a climate this quietly persistent Annual Maintenance Plans and a scheduled look are the mechanism, and our Inspections page sets out what that actually means.