PLACENTIA : New Policy Allows Wood-Shake Roofs

A policy that would have required homeowners to replace wood-shake roofs with another material when re-roofing was rejected by the City Council last week in favor of a less stringent policy.

The new policy allows homeowners to replace wood shake with the same type of material and allows wood shake on roofs that don’t currently have them. Previously, homeowners were prohibited from replacing other types of roofs with wood shake.

Wood shakes have come under attack as being a fire hazard. A major apartment fire that left 150 people homeless in Santa Ana last April was blamed in part on the apartments’ wood roofs. Also that month, a condominium on Belmont Court in Placentia was gutted when a hot object was thrown onto its wood-shingle roof.

Last month, Joyce Rosenthal, the city’s director of development services, proposed extending the ordinance to include all homes being re-roofed, a move that could have reduced the number of wood-shake roofs in the city.

But representatives of several homeowners’ associations complained that the proposed policy would create architectural chaos in their neighborhoods.

The policy “would create a checkerboard effect,” said Eleanor Fitz-Rankin, who lives in Broadmoor Homes, a condominium complex. Without roof uniformity, the complex is “unattractive,” she said.

But not all condominium dwellers were pleased with the council’s decision to soften the policy. Several were pushing for the more stringent policy, which would prevent homeowners’ associations from requiring wood roofs, a common requirement.

“I am not pleased with the result,” said resident Jessie Byron. “When my roof was replaced three years ago,” she said, the homeowners’ association “made me put on a wood-shake roof, which is a fire hazard.”