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Posted by David Sherman [216.18.131.83] on Monday, October 19, 2009 at 01:40:49 :
In Reply to: Re: O.T. One good thing about the recession posted by clueless [201.197.229.218] on Monday, October 19, 2009 at 01:00:11 :
I know a guy that worked on those mega-subdivisions of tract houses they were throwing up all around Vegas during the boom. He said they were so crooked that to make the cabinets fit they'd have a guy take a big angle grinder and grind down the floor, sometimes right through it until the cabinets fit. Once the trim was on, the buyers wouldn't even know. He also said that the only sheathing on the walls was one panel at each corner as per code. On the straight parts of the wall, they'd just nail styrofoam to the studs and blow stucco over the foam. You could kick your foot right through the walls if you knew where to kick, which some of the burglars did.
As for the houses turning to mold, we already went through that with the LP siding that everybody was using on all the tract houses and cheap condos 20 years ago. The stuff was basically the same as OSB, except made to look like boards. It might have been okay in the desert but on the wet side of the mountains it quickly turned back into the pile of wood chips it was made out of. Now they all use hardi-plank which is way better, but we'll see in 30 years how it holds up compared to clear heart cedar or asbestos shingles.
Houses are basically disposable nowadays. If they last until the mortgage is paid off, that's good enough. A lot of the time they don't even make it that far. I saw a video recently of some subdivision of McMansions that was being torn down before anybody had even moved into the houses. It was in California or Nevada somewhere. Apparently the city authorities were threatening to fine the owner, which was a bank that had gotten them back from the bankrupt developer, for every day that the houses were vacant saying that the subdivision was "blight", so rather than finish whatever little things needed to be done -- mostly landscaping -- and sell the houses for whatever pennies on the dollar they could get, they just had a guy come in with an excavator and crunch them all up.