Northridge
The Landlord's Guide to Fast Appliance Turnarounds Near CSUN
Every August, my phone does the same thing. Starting around the first week, it fills up with property managers and small landlords along the Reseda Boulevard corridor, all saying some version of the same sentence: “New tenants move in Saturday and the fridge isn’t cooling.”
I’ve been fixing appliances in the Valley since 2008, and a big slice of my Northridge work is student rentals. The blocks between Nordhoff and Plummer, the fourplexes off Zelzah, the older eight-unit buildings on Darby and Lindley — if you own one of those, your appliances live a harder life than almost any others I see. This post is the advice I give landlords who ask, written down so I can stop repeating myself in driveways.
Your Northridge Kitchen Was Probably Remodeled After '94 — and Those Appliances Are Now 30 Years Old
I can walk into a kitchen anywhere between Devonshire and Nordhoff and guess the remodel year within about three years. White-on-white cabinets, almond or bisque appliances, a GE or Whirlpool badge, maybe a trash compactor nobody has used since the Clinton administration. That kitchen was rebuilt between 1995 and 2000.
The reason is obvious if you were here: January 17, 1994. The Northridge earthquake cracked slabs, dropped cabinets, snapped gas lines, and pushed a whole neighborhood’s worth of insurance money into kitchen contractors over the following few years. Sherman Way to Rinaldi, huge numbers of kitchens got gutted and rebuilt in the same five-year window.