24H Mold Inspection of Santa Monica

The Third Street blocks were closed to cars in 1965 as one of the country's first pedestrian malls and rebuilt as the Promenade in 1989, but the buildings lining them are older than either date — 1920s and 1930s brick and early reinforced concrete with shared party walls and low-slope roofs drained by a handful of interior drains and scuppers. A blocked drain up there spreads water sideways across a ceiling instead of dripping in one obvious place. The city's 2017 seismic retrofit ordinance now reaches roughly two thousand buildings citywide, unreinforced masonry among them, and that work opens wall cavities and roof-to-wall connections nobody has looked behind in decades.

Ocean Park was laid out as a beach resort in 1892, and the amusement pier that defined it — Pacific Ocean Park, open from 1958 until 1967 — burned in stages and was cleared by the mid-1970s. What survives inland is a dense grid of 1900s-to-1920s beach cottages and bungalow courts on shallow raised foundations, set on sand a short distance above the water table. Sand drains quickly but the ground underneath stays humid, so the sub-floor beneath these cottages holds moisture while the yard looks dry. Salt fog attacks flashing, fasteners, and window hardware on the seaward elevations faster than anything inland, and many of these houses have no real attic above the ceiling.

Clover Field opened here in the 1920s and became the Douglas Aircraft plant that built the DC-3; during the war the entire complex was hidden under camouflage netting painted to look like an ordinary suburb from the air. Much of Sunset Park is the housing that went up for those workers between the late 1930s and the 1940s — small stucco bungalows, some on slab and some on raised floors, built quickly and to wartime material standards. The runway was shortened in 2017 and the airport is scheduled to close by the end of 2028. This is flat ground that drains slowly toward the storm system, and additions from every decade since have left roof-to-wall transitions as the routine intrusion point.

The blocks north of Montana Avenue hold the city's largest concentration of 1920s and 1930s Spanish Colonial Revival houses: clay barrel tile roofs over cement stucco applied to wire lath and building paper, with no drainage plane behind it and no cavity insulation — an assembly that sheds water at its surface and has nowhere to send whatever gets past. The coral trees in the San Vicente median, designated a city landmark in 1976, date from the same era of development. These are also among the few homes in the city with real basements, and the modern rebuilds replacing them dig further down still for subterranean garages, where below-grade waterproofing and a shallow coastal water table decide whether the lowest level stays dry.

Wilshire Boulevard between the ocean and the eastern city limit is lined with 1950s and 1960s mid-rise apartment buildings and medical offices, many built over tuck-under parking with units stacked on shared plumbing risers. The corridor took severe damage in the January 17, 1994 earthquake — Providence Saint John's was hurt badly enough to require rebuilding, and hundreds of buildings across the city were red-tagged — and the shaking that cracked stucco also cracked cast-iron drain lines inside the walls. Three decades of slow seepage from those joints surfaces a floor or two below the source, so the unit that reports a stained ceiling is rarely the one holding the leak.