Who owns what in a Hollywood building
Hollywood has a median build year of 1969 across 72,843 housing units, which places most of the city in the first generation of Florida housing designed around central air conditioning from the outset rather than having it retrofitted later. That sounds like an advantage and it cuts both ways. These houses were designed to be cooled, so the envelope is tighter than the pre-war stock further south, but they were designed to a 1960s understanding of it: ducts sized generously, equipment specified by rule of thumb, and very little attention paid to what happens to humidity when the machine is satisfied early. Forty-three per cent of the stock is single-family detached and another 19% sits in buildings of fifty units or more, so the city carries both the single-storey slab house and the mid-century beachside block, and those two fail in completely different ways.
In any building held in units, the first question is not what is growing. It is which side of the unit boundary the water came from, because that decides who pays for all of it. A condominium unit is defined by a line written into the declaration, usually running along the unfinished surfaces of the perimeter walls, floor and ceiling. Everything beyond it is a common element the association maintains. That line is invisible and water crosses it constantly.
In older stock across this county the sources are almost all on the far side of your wall. Facade and window perimeter sealant that has had decades of salt and ultraviolet, letting driven rain into the wall assembly. Plumbing risers and stack vents in a chase shared between stacked units. Roof and balcony drainage arriving several floors below the failure. And the unit above, which is the commonest of all and the slowest to establish because it needs access nobody wants to give.
What decides responsibility is where the source sits, not where the damage appears. So the inspection in Hollywood is built around tracing the path rather than documenting the stain: metering the wall and ceiling on a grid so the gradient shows the direction of travel, and thermal imaging to follow the cold path back towards the entry. We do not tell you what your declaration says, because that is a document for you and your lawyer. We tell you which side of the wall the water came from.
The commercial position in Hollywood is the one published on every page of this site, because the rate card is not a Fort Lauderdale rate card. A flat price by property size, agreed before anyone drives out, with the accredited laboratory fee already inside it. It does not rise if the samples come back positive, nothing is added for the drive, and we take no payment of any kind from anyone who removes mold.
What Hollywood itself changes
Where the water comes from
Hollywood sits inside the footprint of the April 2023 rainfall event, the one that put 25.91 inches on this coastline in 24 hours against a previous record of 14.59 set in 1979. That matters here for a specific reason: the older eastern parts of the city sit on a street grid laid out long before modern stormwater design, so water that arrives faster than the system can take it stands rather than drains. Add the ordinary wet season, 47.27 of the 66.52 inches this coast averages arriving between May and October, and a good share of the calls we take in Hollywood are about a building that took water once and was dried in a hurry.
Where it hides in these buildings
The 1960s single-storey stock here puts almost everything that matters out of sight in two places. The first is the attic, where the air handler frequently sits along with duct runs that were insulated to the standard of the day and have had sixty years to compress, slip or split. The second is the slab edge, where a terrazzo or tiled floor meets an exterior block wall, which on a house of this era has no capillary break worth the name. Growth at a wall base behind furniture is the commonest Hollywood finding and it is invisible until something is moved.
The cooling systems here
Original ductwork is the defining piece of equipment in Hollywood, because the cooling has been replaced two or three times since 1969 and the duct almost never has. What that produces is a modern, efficient condenser and air handler blowing into a distribution system designed for a different machine, with insulation that has aged out and joints that have opened. In the beachside blocks the picture is different again: through-wall and packaged terminal units serving one room each, with no whole-house dehumidification anywhere in the building and a wall sleeve detailed half a century ago.