Roofing in Union City, CA

Union City was created on January 13, 1959, when the old towns of Alvarado and Decoto voted to incorporate together. Alvarado, on the west side near Alvarado Boulevard and Union City Boulevard, was Alameda County's first county seat in the 1850s, and its Old Alvarado district still has a handful of nineteenth-century commercial buildings and older cottages. Decoto, on the east side along Decoto Road, grew up around the railroad in 1870, and its older blocks near Mission Boulevard hold small early-1900s houses and later bungalows.

Between them was farmland, and the farmland is where most of Union City lives today. The population went from about 6,600 in 1960 to more than 70,000 by 2020, with the fastest growth in the 1970s, and the subdivisions that filled the flats between Alvarado and Decoto in those years are the city's primary housing stock: single-story and two-story tract houses on curving streets off Alvarado-Niles Road, Dyer Street and Union City Boulevard. The 1980s and 1990s added more tracts toward the hills and the Union Landing shopping center, the 100-acre retail center completed in 1999 on the site of a former drive-in theater.

A 1970s Union City house was almost always built with a wood shake roof, and the shake is long gone. Most of these houses got a composition shingle roof in the 1990s or 2000s, often laid over the original skip sheathing with plywood added, sometimes over a first layer of shingle, and that replacement roof is now itself at the end of its life. The signs are the same across the tracts: granule loss on the south slopes, curling and cracking at the edges, moss on the north side under a street tree, and stains inside at the plumbing vents and the chimney.

Our roof replacement on one of these houses is a full tear-off. We take it to the deck, replace any delaminated plywood, add solid sheathing over skip boards where needed, install new underlayment and metal at every edge, valley and penetration, and lay an architectural shingle with ridge and eave ventilation the original builder never provided. The 1980s two-story houses add a few things: taller chimneys with more flashing to get right, and more complicated rooflines with valleys and dead ends that collect leaves. Our asphalt shingle roofing page goes through the shingle choices.

Union City's western edge runs out toward the bay flats and the salt marsh along the Alameda Creek Flood Control Channel and Old Alameda Creek, and the weather is bayside weather. Average highs run from the high 50s in winter to the high 70s in summer, and the marine layer comes in most summer evenings and hangs over the west side until mid-morning. The city is in Energy Code climate zone 3, the cool marine zone, like Fremont. That damp morning air is why north-facing slopes grow moss and algae and why wood fascia and rafter tails rot at the gutter line on houses that have no leak at all.

Rain averages around 15 inches a year, concentrated from November through March, and the atmospheric-river storms of recent years have delivered much of a season's rain in a few days with wind behind it. The flat tract streets do not drain fast, gutters overflow, and every pipe flashing that was painted instead of protected shows itself. A roof inspection before the season, with a look at the attic for daylight and old stains, is what we recommend for any Union City house more than a few years past its last roof.

Not every Union City roof needs replacing. A large share of our calls here are roof repair jobs: a section of lifted shingles after a windy storm, a cracked plastic pipe boot, a chimney whose counter flashing has pulled out of the mortar, rotted soffit and fascia behind a gutter that overflowed for years. When the leak is not obvious, our roof leak repair and detection service traces it from the stain back to the source, which on a 1980s two-story is often a valley or a dead-end wall, not the spot above the ceiling.

Adeline does the estimate visit herself, walks the roof and the attic, and writes down what she finds. If it is a repair, the estimate is a repair. If the roof has reached the point where repairs would be throwing money at it, she says that instead and explains why.

Union City is a short drive from where California Stone Coating, Inc. makes the product, and there is no roof in our service area where it makes more sense. A pipe flashing on a bayside roof lives in damp air half the year. Painted galvanized metal, which is what most roofers install, begins to wear within the first year, rust starts where the paint fails, and the base of the pipe flashing, where imperfections in the metal meet the roofing, is where the water gets in.

Sonrise finishes every roof with stone-coated flashings and vents from California Stone Coating, the Fremont manufacturer. The baked-on granule finish matches the shingle color, resists rust, is designed not to chip, peel or fade, and most importantly helps waterproof and protect the flashing at the base of the pipe. On a Union City tract house with four or five plumbing vents and a furnace flue on one slope, the difference between painted pipes and stone-coated ones is visible from the street and, more to the point, visible in the attic after the first storm. Our stone-coated flashings page has the full product story.

The street trees planted in the 1970s tracts are big now, and the gutters under them fill every fall. Our gutters and downspouts service replaces sagging original gutters with seamless aluminum gutters, adds guards where the trees make cleaning a twice-a-year job, and cleans them before the rain. Inside the house, the 1970s attic usually has a few inches of old insulation and no real airflow; our ventilation and insulation page explains how ridge and eave venting and added insulation make an older Union City house cheaper to heat in winter and cooler through the few hot weeks of a bayside summer.

Re-roofing in Union City requires a permit from the City of Union City Building Division, part of the Economic and Community Development Department, at 34009 Alvarado-Niles Road. Replacement or repair of 100 square feet or less within a year does not need a permit; anything larger does, and the city inspects the work. Title 24 cool-roof rules apply to re-roofs, though in climate zone 3 they are lighter than in the inland cities. Sonrise pulls the permit, includes the product documentation, and schedules the inspections.

Union City sits between Fremont, our home city, and Hayward to the north, with Newark on the bay side to the southwest. Every city we serve is on our service areas hub, and Union City is the one we reach fastest.