Well anecdotally, here in SoCal, McMansion capitol of the planet, I’m not seeing it.
Myself and my circle of friends have had assorted houses of assorted sizes and ages, and save for my 1960 ranch built on truly horrible soil, nobody has encountered any gross problems.
One is over 20 years old with nothing of note. Another is push 35 with nothing of note. My then new and lived in townhouse for 6 years had no issues. My friends in the Inland Empire (where housing was “cheap”) have had no complaints.
Partly I credit the building codes in CA and the communities. A friend recently explored building a house and was required to do an updated soil study, for example.
The expanding clay soil that they dropped my house on 40 years before we bought it converted the slab to gravel. All sorts of movement in that house. At one point you could tell the season based on the size of the crack in the bathroom wall, it moved visibly over time.
The entire neighborhood was like this. And, yea, they were expensive to fix. But the contractor gutting my rooms commented on how well the house itself was built. Today, I think what happened there could (should) not happen.
I had to re-pour foundations, re-line sewers, replace HVAC on that house.
Mind I certainly wouldn’t want to redo the flooring of a 4000 sq ft house. But the bones, core features and fundamentals seem to last.
And, for sure, there are different grades of builders. Homes at different price points. But much of that is fit and finish cosmetics vs fundamentals of the house.
I can’t speak to other neighborhoods. But I imagine it’s more than basic maintenance that’s driving folks away.
Make no mistake, larger houses cost more. More flooring to buy. More walls to paint. Larger HVAC to service. More cu ft to heat and cool.
But I’ll bet the sewer line for the cheap house and expensive house are fundamentally identical.
But I think the baseline, for the big parts, those dictated by codes and inspections, at least, anecdotally, in SoCal, seems pretty solid.
I think there can be some self-selection bias involved in this assessment. Maintenance is something that some people are disinclined to attempt at all: they "consume" their housing, vehicles, furniture etc. instead. In essence what they demand is an IKEA house. The market will meet that demand to the extent that regulation allows it.
As well, each generation of housing stock has a share of survivors that often were invested in more heavily early on, preventing small maintenance issues from developing into bigger ones. Foundation settlement is a common issue, as you point out. But for one example of what can go wrong with a whole generation, the move towards greater insulation ran into a widespread problem of toxic mold in the 2000's, caused by trapped water vapor in the structural materials. Those houses, McMansions among them, were lost, and made their owners sick. Building standards account for this now, but that kind of thing crops up with each change in practices, so I always see the first 5-10 years as a kind of proving ground: if it gets through that without turning into a nightmare it can usually go for many more decades.
I always wondered what a house "designed for maintenance" would look like. I imagine '70's style paneled interiors, but each panel comes off with a couple bolts, and you can rip out the insulation and replace it with state-of-the-art, run new Ethernet or coax trivially, or neatly replace a leaky pipe without huge rework afterwards.
Myself and my circle of friends have had assorted houses of assorted sizes and ages, and save for my 1960 ranch built on truly horrible soil, nobody has encountered any gross problems.
One is over 20 years old with nothing of note. Another is push 35 with nothing of note. My then new and lived in townhouse for 6 years had no issues. My friends in the Inland Empire (where housing was “cheap”) have had no complaints.
Partly I credit the building codes in CA and the communities. A friend recently explored building a house and was required to do an updated soil study, for example.
The expanding clay soil that they dropped my house on 40 years before we bought it converted the slab to gravel. All sorts of movement in that house. At one point you could tell the season based on the size of the crack in the bathroom wall, it moved visibly over time.
The entire neighborhood was like this. And, yea, they were expensive to fix. But the contractor gutting my rooms commented on how well the house itself was built. Today, I think what happened there could (should) not happen.
I had to re-pour foundations, re-line sewers, replace HVAC on that house.
Mind I certainly wouldn’t want to redo the flooring of a 4000 sq ft house. But the bones, core features and fundamentals seem to last.
And, for sure, there are different grades of builders. Homes at different price points. But much of that is fit and finish cosmetics vs fundamentals of the house.
I can’t speak to other neighborhoods. But I imagine it’s more than basic maintenance that’s driving folks away.
Make no mistake, larger houses cost more. More flooring to buy. More walls to paint. Larger HVAC to service. More cu ft to heat and cool.
But I’ll bet the sewer line for the cheap house and expensive house are fundamentally identical.
But I think the baseline, for the big parts, those dictated by codes and inspections, at least, anecdotally, in SoCal, seems pretty solid.