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.
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.
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.
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the corporate builders are throwing together what in some cases are literal paper houses where even OSB sheathing has been replaced by what can only be called fancy cardboard.
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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.
>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?
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").