Another warning is being raised concerning the state of modern home building, exhorting new home buyers to check, double check and triple check construction before handing over their money.

This time the warning comes from Fine Homebuilding magazine, whose summer issue just hit the news stands.

"Every good carpenter in America can tell you what's going to happen in a few years when those (new) overblown houses start to mature. They will unravel," writes Barbara Flanagan in the "Taking Issue" section of the magazine.

"You can almost hear the sound of nails popping, drywall tape peeling, floors creaking, doors sticking and laminates delaminating all over America."

Flanagan, who writes about design for The New York Times and Metropolis, suggests -- only slightly tongue-in-cheek -- that carpenters, handymen and repairmen will rule in the next millennia as cosmetically gorgeous but structurally unsound homes start coming apart.

Her warning is similar to that sent out last month by H. Alan Mooney, president of Criterium Engineers, one of the nation's largest home inspection companies, who is predicting construction problems on a massive scale within the next few years -- almost all of them in new homes.

Mooney argues that in the current building boom small and medium sized builders are under pressure to take on too many jobs and finish them too quickly so they can get paid and move on to the next project. He also says that with the current low employment, builders are being forced to take on untrained workers and do not have enough trained supervisors to watch their work.

"In most cases, pride and craftsmanship no longer prevail," Mooney said. "A Master Builder in the 19th century tradition embodied the skills today credited to builders, architects and engineers. Things were done for purposes greater than "get it done fast and cheap." Adding to the mix, says Mooney, is the lack of good quality land to build on.

"A lot of builders are making bad guesses on soils," he said in the Spring issue of Real Estate Intelligence Report. "Ten years ago (by zoning restriction) you couldn't build on some of the land we're seeing now."

Many builders "are not taking time to analyze the soils or they just don't know how."

In Fine Homebuilding, Flanagan points the finger at a consumer culture that constantly demands possessions that are newer and bigger.

"Although American consumers have impeccable standards for the design and performance of compact electronics -- PCs, CD players, camcorders -- they,ve gotten goofy about bigger things in life, like houses," she writes. "Large houses are not large enough; buyers long for four-garage Tudors in mansion tracts," she says, but, "To make things affordable, you have to make them fast and shoddy."

The heroes of the next century, she predicts, will be those individuals who are physically skilled at manual labor, who are able to rebuild sagging floors and cracked foundations. Writes Flanagan, "It's a member of this dying breed of craftsman -- soft-spoken and skilled -- who will save the day."

Published: May 4, 1999

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