America's Large Homebuilders Shift the Cost of Shoddy Construction to Buyers
hntrbrk.com
hntrbrk.com
I really don't think it's a skill issue, because these people knew what they were doing. It just feels like nobody gives a sh*t. If I bend a piece of conduit that's in a visible part of my basement and it's crooked or off, I'll take it down and re-bend it. If I install a piece of base trim and there's a huge gap between pieces, I'll cut a new piece. There's no attention to detail, and I am _willing to pay extra_ for that. Charge me for the extra conduit or base trim.
I've actually entertained the idea of starting my own electrical contractor company and hiring/training ex-software engineers. I feel like we as a profession generally don't like sloppiness and most of us are nitpicky enough (myself included) to produce quality work. I can't be the only one out there that's happy to pay a little extra if they know they're not getting garbage.
Not the only one, but there is just not a large market for it. And it likely would not be a “little” extra either.
I’ve tried to find local contractors who will just take pride in their work and get it done right (or overkill I suppose by my standards) the first time. Even old mainstays that are regularly double the cost of everyone else have been slipping lately. Companies I used to single bid for jobs knowing I was overpaying but didn’t care since I didn’t have to come behind them to audit or fix anything. They have all devolved.
There is a market at the very high end for ultra wealthy folks at something like 4-8x regular contractor rates. I’ve seen a few friends engage such folks. Most of that is in overpaying for a GC to manage their network of above average contractors and have the budget to make things right if one messes up.
Such companies seem to have zero interest in jobs not in the low 7 figures.
I would pay at least double “market” rate if I could find an electric contractor willing to take on my “crazy” home solar and battery backup project. The problem is the market for people willing to overpay for commercial quality work that will never have a dream of paying their costs back in solar savings is effectively zero. So goes for everything these days.
That said I just had my floors refinished and the contractors we lucked into finding for that 2 week job went above and beyond even my level of attention to detail. They were not any more expensive than competing bids. So who knows. It’s a crapshoot.
It's funny you mention this, because I also have generally had good luck with flooring contractors.
> I’ve tried to find local contractors who will just take pride in their work and get it done right (or overkill I suppose by my standards) the first time. Even old mainstays that are regularly double the cost of everyone else have been slipping lately. Companies I used to single bid for jobs knowing I was overpaying but didn’t care since I didn’t have to come behind them to audit or fix anything. They have all devolved.
You nailed it. I think most of the higher bid folks these days are deliberately quoting an inflated price because they either don't want to do the job or are trying to charge commercial rates. I'm sure the commercial jobs are much more lucrative and you won't get people complaining about a crooked pipe. They generally don't care, as long as everything works
Thanks for that, needed a deep guttural laugh.
Also similar to you, I feel I could become a licensed electrician and start that as my fallback career.
It's not like houses were always perfect in the past though. My 1953 house has construction debris mixed in to the concrete foundation in the corner of the garage, where I assume they ran out of concrete, and knots in the roof planks patched with garbage as well.
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.
Nothing under the sun is new, but we do currently live in a time with unprecedented levels of open corruption where nobody seems to feel the slightest amount of guilt for clearly immoral behavior as long as they get away with it.
And even in cases where what you do is explicitly illegal legal enforcement is largely contingent on whether or not whatever corrupt thing you did made you rich enough to pay the Get Out of Jail tax.
Historically speaking, current levels of corruption in most of the world are either low, or completely precedented.
In the US specifically, corruption may be higher the last decade than in the couple of decades precloud, but certainly is not as high as 120 years ago.
There was some goings on related to foreign territories and annexation that I don't well recall, but to this day Grant's degree of involvement is debated - he tolerated much corruption from his personal secretary, defended him, and steered corruption investigations away until eventually removing Babcock(?) from his post.
Much pressure was exerted during this period, I hazard some of that pressure was via threats to persons, their assets, and perhaps their families.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandals_of_the_Grant_administ...
The general amount of corruption in local politics was also greater pre-depression than now.
They were the very basis of the subject fraud too, the incremental, cascading slide and destruction of quality through fraud, even if it took time for the incremental, “salami slicing” to get to this point where contacted, foreign national, fly by night operations underlying all the corporate builders are throwing together what in some cases are literal paper houses where even OSB sheathing has been replaced by what can only be called fancy cardboard.
Traditionally this state near the capital city has had a lot of double brick builds, more so than other parts of the world - due to a combination of the "right" soils and a long standing still expanding massive brick company (Midland Brick).
The greatest growth in "alternative" building has been in the factory built modular home area - not just dumpy dongars and demountable shipping container like homes, but multi part slide together modules that together make up a large "pre built home" - say, four large oversize truck loads each with a complete foundation (thick concrete floor) framed, walled, roofed, plumbed and wired chunk o'house that gets lowered slid and jacked in place, then all parts are pulled into together to make a seamless appearing whole.
It's a day to land, a second day to hook up to septic + water + power and drop verandahs and shading in place attached to the home.
That approach has seen a rapid increase in build time as the chunk parts are all created in large warehouse spaces with overhead crane rigs and racks of supply chain parts allowing multiple home builds to be interwoven in a pipeline that concentrates tradesmen and allows (say) an electrician to pull and plate several partial homes in a day or two.
The build quality (so far, from several I've seen) has been consistently up to code with a significant time and money cost saving to owner over other build methods.
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").
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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.
While I have no doubt these complaints are real this feels like it's trying to gin up evidence for a position more than anything
Before the '60s or so, you'd see a lot of narrow-ring old growth flawless, knot-free stuff used in framing and even huge support members, of a quality that'd be reserved for things like solid wood furniture, trim & finishes, and veneer after that (and then phased out of trim and finishes somewhat later).
What happened is it stopped being just as cheap as new growth—that is, it got rare enough and new growth got cheap enough that farming new growth finally became viable, and soon dominated.
Something "funny" related to this happened with wood-shingled housing in the US in the '80s: wood shingles had a reputation for being premium, long-lasting roofing, but this was a reputation built in the era when all of it was thick shake made out of that excellent old growth stuff. It got trendy in the '80s, spiking demand, just as the material for the real stuff, the stuff that was the reason people wanted it, got too rare to practically use for that anymore (except for way higher prices). What was installed was thinner, and made of worse wood.
The roofs installed on new houses in that period soon became notorious for leaks and often ending up covered over with desperately-applied asphalt shingles within 15 years, while the wood roofs were supposed to last closer to 50... but that was the old material, the new stuff was still wood but was not the same product, as that no longer existed as something Mere Mortals could afford.
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.
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.
>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
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?