Piers reliably carry load on ground below the moving layer, and that part is well established. What varies is whether the untreated ground around them keeps swinging, which is what produces new symptoms after a repair.

The mechanism a Houston repair has to work against

Up to 51% clay in the mapped soil, rated Somewhat poorly drained for drainage. That combination is the mechanism: water arrives, the clay takes it up and expands, the dry season pulls it back out and the volume falls. Support addresses where the house has already gone. Only drainage addresses where the ground is going next, which is why the two belong in one scope.

The half of the job aimed at the soil

There are two claims inside the question and they get different answers. Whether a column founded on competent ground can hold up part of a building is settled and uninteresting: routine structural engineering, long predating every firm now selling it.

Whether that same column stops the building moving is the unsettled half. On its own it does not. Water in the soil is the actor here, and no pier has any effect on water. The Harris County mapping places the largest mapped soil unit in hydrologic soil group C/D, the category for soil that sheds water rather than absorbing it. Rain that runs off instead of soaking in still ends up somewhere, commonly against the perimeter of whatever it ran off. The soil there goes on swelling and shrinking, cycle after cycle. Hold up one portion of a building while the neighboring ground carries on cycling, and the gap between them widens. That is the mechanism behind cracks that appear after the invoice is paid.

Jobs that last do both things at once: carry the section that already dropped, and change how much water reaches the soil around everything else. The second is the cheaper one and the one most often absent from the scope, sometimes because a different trade quotes it separately and nobody chased that quote. Most reports that foundation repair failed turn out to be reports about what the scope left out.

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