Are foundation cracks serious? — Answered for Houston, TX

Concrete cracks as it cures and as it takes up load, so most cracks are ordinary. The ones that matter are growing, and a crack that is growing matters more than a wider one that has been still for a decade.

What cracks a Houston house in the first place

The dominant mapped soil unit here is Clodine-Urban land complex, 0 to 1 percent slopes, and the mapped units run to 51% clay. Clay does not stay the same size: it expands as it takes on water and contracts as it dries, and a structure bearing on it rides that difference every year. Cracking is the visible record of the difference, which is why it is common here and why common does not mean meaningless.

Direction, pattern, and 51.2 percent clay

Almost everybody reaches for width first, and width is the least informative thing about a crack. A hairline opening steadily is a worse finding than a wide one that has sat still for a decade, and a single photograph cannot tell them apart. Direction carries far more. A diagonal running out of a door or window corner is the shape a wall makes when the ground beneath one end dropped relative to the other. A vertical crack mid-wall is often shrinkage. Horizontal cracking comes from lateral pressure instead, and that is the one to have looked at soonest.

The reason diagonals are common in this area sits in the soil. The Harris County mapping records a highest mapped surface clay content of 51.2 percent. Clay in that proportion changes volume as its water content changes, and volume change beneath part of a slab but not the rest is exactly what leaves one corner of a house standing at a different height from another.

Where the signs sit relative to one another outranks both tests. Half the name of the biggest unit in that county clip, the Clodine-Urban land complex, refers to urban land, meaning mapped ground with construction sitting on top of it. Paving and structures decide where rain reaches soil at all, so moisture can arrive very unevenly around a single house in a dense city. Signs bunched into one quadrant mean something. The same count spread around the perimeter usually means the house is old.

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