There is no windbreak here. Where a house in a built-up neighborhood is partly shielded by everything around it, a Ripon home on the edge of town takes the wind directly, and so does its roof. Rake edges, ridge caps and the starter course along the eaves are where that shows up first.
Open ground also means hail arrives without anything intercepting it, and it hits whole roof slopes evenly rather than in the patchy pattern you get under tree cover.
The town has a handsome historic core: the Watson Street commercial block, the college, and the streets of well-kept older homes around them. These are properties where the paint job is the thing people see, and where a badly cut line on a porch column is noticed.