How do pre-1950 houses sit on their foundation Your home’s foundation is one of the most important aspects of its build, and the health of your foundation should be an integral part of how you ensure that your home remains safe from harm when a natural disaster hits, for example a flood, landslide, or earthquake. We recently had a conversation with one of our clients [...]
Why does a home foundation sink Your Los Angeles home is likely constructed on shifting soil that doesn’t fare well under our current climate conditions and our frequent earthquake activity. Some of the most common causes that cause a foundation to settle and sink include poor drainage around the foundation, which saturates the concrete and makes it brittle, as well as the frequent seismic activity [...]
What is the City of Los Angeles Housing and Community Investment Department (“HCIDLA”) In some of our previous blogs (see links at the end of this page) we discussed the requirements of the City of Los Angeles’ Soft Story Retrofit Program and the function of the City of Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety (“LADBS”). In this blog we discuss the important role of the City’s [...]
For many Los Angeles homeowners, especially those living in hillside homes, the dangers of mudslides and water runoff from rain are ever-present. In the past few years, we have seen again and again how homes in our own neighborhoods are damaged and even destroyed during inclement weather. Thankfully, there are ways to prevent mud, soil, debris, and water runoff from sliding into our homes! One [...]
What is the most common cause of foundation failure If you worry about the health of your home’s foundation, you are quite right to be concerned, as sadly, foundation failures in our region are a common occurrence. This is not just because of the earthquakes which subject our homes to intense pressures, but also because the unique soil we build our homes on makes Los [...]
Can your home survive an earthquake without a retrofit? In the last few years, earthquake scientists have been sounding the alarm about the inevitability of a very large earthquake on the San Andreas fault, which is located only 35 miles from downtown Los Angeles. It is a fact that our fair city typically experiences a very large earthquake every 100 years, and we are all [...]
Can You DIY Your Home’s Earthquake Retrofit? Many Los Angeles homeowners already know that the government’s “Earthquake Brace + Bolt” (“EBB”) program provides families in the Greater Los Angeles area with free money grants of $3,000 (and more!) to subsidize the cost of a California earthquake retrofit. Those homeowners who think that they can DIY their retrofit are taking unnecessary risks with the soundness of [...]
The Danger Of Homes Built Prior To The 1950s Many thousands of homeowners in Los Angeles, and indeed, in the entire State of California, live in homes that were built in the 1950s or earlier, and as such, were built on foundations intended to safeguard the home in the event of a natural disaster such as an earthquake or a mudslide. However, while today’s foundations [...]
Virtually all residential and commercial apartment buildings in the City of Los Angeles have balconies and other “Exterior Elevated Elements” (also called “EEE”) that can pose a safety risk if they are not properly maintained. In recent years, the high-profile collapse of poor-condition EEEs, especially a balcony that resulted in multiple injuries and deaths of students during a birthday party, have paid out multi-million dollar [...]
Balcony Inspection and Repair Legal requirements and liability concerns The State of California has rolled out two new mandatory Balcony Inspection Laws, which were passed by the legislature in 2018 and 2019 in response to the deaths of six UC Berkeley students and the injuries of seven others during the 2015 collapse of a balcony the students were standing on during a birthday party. Legislators [...]
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