Roofing Contractors in the San Fernando Valley

Most of the floor was built once, quickly, in the twenty years after the war. Panorama City is the clearest case. The Los Angeles Conservancy records that Fritz Burns and Associates developed it in the late 1940s for Kaiser Homes, owned by Henry J. Kaiser, on a master plan calling for over 4,000 houses, with components pre-milled at a factory near LAX, and a population of 20,000 by the early 1950s. Ranch and Minimal Traditional, single story, low-pitched gable and hip roofs running long and plain. Van Nuys, Reseda, Canoga Park, Arleta, North Hills and Winnetka repeat that street after street, and the median year built for City of Los Angeles housing is 1965 in American Community Survey table B25037, so most of these houses are on a second or third covering.

What all of it has in common is a lot of roof pointed straight up at the sun. NASA's ECOSTRESS instrument measured peak land surface temperature in the San Fernando Valley at 128.3 degrees on August 14, 2020. That is the number the covering lives at, not the air temperature on the news. Asphalt shingle ages by heat here more than by rain: granules let go, the mat goes brittle, corners curl, and the sealant strip that holds the tabs down softens every summer until it stops re-sealing. The attic below runs hotter again, and on most of these tracts the heating and air ducts are up there in it. A re-roof is when the vents get cut, so it is the one moment ventilation gets sized properly.

The second Valley pattern is the low-slope piece bolted onto a pitched house. Patio covers, carports, converted garages, the den added across the back in 1968, the occasional flat-roofed contemporary. Those sections are a separate trade from the shingle above them, and they are where ponding, split seams and a tired cap sheet turn up. They also carry a stricter reflectance number than the pitched part of the same roof, which is worth knowing before anyone quotes you a black cap sheet. A coating is a reasonable answer on a sound low-slope deck and a poor one on a wet deck.

Then there is the 1990s. The Northridge earthquake hit the middle of the Valley at magnitude 6.7 on January 17, 1994, and the US Geological Survey puts the property damage at about $40 billion. A great deal of Valley housing was repaired and re-covered in the years that followed, and a shingle sold as a thirty-year product in 1996 has run its number out. Nothing dramatic has to happen for it to start letting water in. More of that is on the roof replacement page.

Most Valley addresses are City of Los Angeles, so the permit is LADBS, and the Valley office is the Development Services Center at 6262 Van Nuys Boulevard, second floor, room 251, which does express permits, counter plan check and inspection. Burbank runs its own Building and Safety Division under Community Development and added re-roofing to its online permits. Calabasas at the west end runs its own Building and Safety Division, which reviews plans, issues permits and inspects. Hidden Hills issues its own permits through a building department it contracts out. Glendale has its own department over the Verdugo line, covered on the Glendale page.

The one that trips people up shares the name. The City of San Fernando is an independent city of about two and a third square miles at the north end, completely surrounded by the City of Los Angeles, with its own Building and Safety Division at City Hall on Macneil Street, which reviews all construction plans and inspects all permitted construction inside the city limits. A house there permits at that counter. A house a few blocks away in Sylmar or Pacoima permits at Van Nuys. The San Fernando Valley and the City of San Fernando are two different jurisdictions, and only one of them has a city hall. Universal City is a third case, unincorporated Los Angeles County, so a job there permits through LA County Public Works and not LADBS, even though city surrounds it on all but its northeastern corner, which touches Burbank. Pulling the permit is our job and not yours, but it is worth knowing which office your job is sitting in.

Estimate ranges for Los Angeles County, not quotes.

• Small repair(slipped shingles, resealing a vent, clearing a drain): roughly $400 to $900.
• Single-source leak(chimney or skylight flashing, a localized shingle repair, a flat-roof seam): roughly $800 to $2,500.
• Composition shingle replacement:roughly $9,000 to $25,000.
• Flat or low-slope (TPO, modified bitumen, cap sheet):roughly $12,000 to $30,000.
• Tile lift and relay,where a house has tile: roughly $12,000 to $30,000.
• Solar panel removal and reinstall:roughly $4,000 to $10,000, on top of the roof itself.

The Valley floor sits in the lower half of the shingle range more often than the hillsides do. One story, plain gable and hip shapes, a driveway or an alley for the bin, and no fire assembly to build underneath. What moves a floor quote up is the low-slope section on the side of the house, and a deck that turns out to be soft once the covering is off. What moves a hillside quote up is access and the zone. The roofing costs page breaks the rest of it down.