Local Treatments in Oakland, CA

Oakland Climate

Oakland runs warmer than San Francisco because the hills break up the heaviest marine push, so the flats get more sun and hold more heat into the evening. Summer afternoons commonly reach 80–85°F. Drywood termite swarms come off in late summer and early fall, roughly August through October, which is when homeowners find wings on a windowsill and call. Rain averages about 22 inches a year and falls almost entirely between November and March. That is the window when hillside crawl spaces and estuary-side soils hold the moisture subterranean termites work in, and it is why a hills inspection in February reads differently from the same house in August.

Housing Stock

Oakland really has two housing stocks, and they are about eighty-five years apart. The flats hold pre-1930 Craftsman bungalows and Edwardian flats on narrow city lots, raised over cripple walls and shallow basements and framed in old-growth Douglas fir, and a large share have never been tented, so colonies sit in several chambers of the same structure. East Oakland added tract housing through the 1940s and 1950s. The hills are the exception, because the 1991 Tunnel Fire burned through Hiller Highlands, Parkwoods, upper Rockridge and the ridge neighborhoods and destroyed close to three thousand homes. Most of what stands up there now was rebuilt from the 1990s on, with modern framing, pressure-treated sills, and stucco or fiber-cement cladding. A drywood inspection in the flats and a moisture inspection in the hills are close to opposite jobs, and an inspector who runs the same route on both will miss something.