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.

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.

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.

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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'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?

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").

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.