This is not new. I just watched a video a few days ago talking about Levittown, built in the post-WWII boom, where the house lots were just big enough to build septic systems for each, given the current state of the ground/drainage. So as the soil compacted/absorbed the output of the houses, and as people installed washing machines, and and as people converted their attics to additional bedrooms (which they were originally told was fine to do) and occupancy/water use went up, hundreds (thousands?) of backyards became soft, smelly swamps. Eventually the whole neighborhood had to switch to sewers, at enormous expense.

For anyone who wants to see clear examples of these defects from an inspectors point of view… For a while I was completely addicted to watching inspection videos of brand new homes where the inspector shows poor craftsmanship and sometimes even dangerous defects - the best in the genre IMO is Cy https://youtube.com/@cyfyhomeinspections?si=zldoP3BpzK6mUzDc check out his YT shorts. Example after example of terrible defects in brand new homes in Arizona

>“You have to start value-engineering every component of the home, which means making compromises, not in quality, but in the way that you actually configure the homes,” Lennar CEO Stuart Miller said in an interview with Bloomberg Television last year.

>D.R. Horton similarly promised its investors it would find ways to cut costs, like “replacing certain high quality fixtures and finishes with less expensive yet still high-quality fixtures and finishes.”

Enshittification to the max

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Not saying that these complaints aren’t valid, but this is PR dressed up as reportage by a short seller/litigation investor.

I bought a home a few years ago. We chose an older 1940's wood home near downtown in a California town. Its solid. Meanwhile, friends of ours have bought newly constructed homes with all the modern features, and the horror stories they have...

Companies enshittify in every sector to meet growth targets, and if you believe Bernanke the pressures on growth targets come from the global investment market struggling to find enough places to invest, but where does the undersupply of places to invest come from?

Is it just a civilization-wide structural incentive to overbuild investment capital relative to uses for it or is there a structural cause for inadequate quantities of reliable investment sinks?

Wouldn't surprise me. I live on a small loop that had a vacant lot next door to me (home burned down in the 80s shortly after construction and had stayed vacant until 3 years ago).

One of the big name builders in our county bought the land (we had only just bought our home next door and wish we had been in a position to buy the land) and through up the usual cubical blob with no eaves, no personality, and maximum possible square foot.

It's been three years and not two-three months has gone by without contractors being there to repair damage... fix the fence, fix the foundation, lift the foundation, repair drywall cracks, repair sagging floor, fix HVAC issues. All for the bargain basement price of $600K "builder grade" (Hah, once upon a time I was naive enough to think this meant high-end, not "cheapest shit that will pass code").

I recently bought a home built by Lennar. The project manager kept telling me up until closing about how great the warranty was. He said that the drywall in the hallway going to the basement was going to be finished. When I reported this to the person who handled the warranty he said that the basement wasn't going to be finished. I reported some issues with the cabinets and he said they wouldn't fix it until the 11 month period since he said other things could break until then. He also tried to discourage me from getting an 11 month inspection. When I moved on the grass was almost a foor long and there was a vile infestation in the backyard due to the grass being long. Whenever someone talks about how there is a warranty I usually chuckle a little. The companies know how much it would cost you to sue them.

To be clear small builders have done things far worse in Minnesota. There's a builder on the South side of the Twin Cities that has left many homes with foundation issues. They're no longer in business. My issues look tiny compared to theirs.

Hmm. We (many of us, anyway) keep saying that the solution to housing shortages is to build more homes. But if they're going to be built badly, that somewhat lessens the value of that approach as a solution.

I've owned a range of 21st century construction in Texas. 2023, 2021, 2012 (current), 2009. The one built in 09 is easily the best out of the bunch. I'm currently looking at homes built in the 70s and 80s.

I've learned my lesson about cheap builds with 13 foot ceilings and gigantic rooms. I am over the scale of it all because the acoustics are so goddamned awful you can hardly sleep. Not one of these houses will ever have interior insulation or god forbid actual Rockwool installed anywhere, so the rooms resonate at frequencies that are impossible to mitigate. 13' ceilings have an axial room mode of ~43hz. Good luck mitigating that. Oftentimes the master bedroom has a dimension even larger than this. Your audio system might be tuned to avoid these ranges but traffic noise and the way the hvac system rumbles in your crawl space is much harder to. Pushing into infrasonic is only a viable option when you have an entire stadium at your disposal. This in between realm is awful. The inside of a Walmart feels better acoustically than many of the new homes built around it.

I am looking forward to having 9 foot ceilings and thick-ass brick all the way around again. I'll lose about a thousand sqft of living space and have to deal with all kinds of legacy issues, but at least it's built better.

Almost all new homes in the last 20 years are terrible. Every builder cuts corners. Inspections often can’t see where those savings were made. And insurance or warranties won’t help for many of them. It’s a huge scam and needs legislation.

My experience as a homeowner with relatives in the construction trades is that any tract home / production builder will be equally shoddy. They don't need to be a large publicly traded company like Lennar, DR Horton, or KB Homes to do a terrible job, they just need the wrong incentive structure coupled with no enforcement of quality standards.

Realistically the only way to get a properly built house in the United States is to have a reputable custom home builder do the job, invest heavily in things like engineering up front to minimize geotechnical issues or structural issues that might arise later due to poor homesite choice or architect artistic overreach. That, or buy a well-built home that's already there from before we went fully into production building, which is really just houses made from around 1970 to 1995, before 1970 we were slapping up badly made houses to deal with the postwar boom and after 1995 we went fully into the corporate enshittification hellscape that we currently exist in.

Never, ever, skip an inspection, even on a brand new house, in fact that goes double for a brand new house.