Symptoms cluster: doors sticking on one side of the house, diagonal cracks from door and window corners, gaps opening at the baseboards, floors that fall away as you cross a room. One symptom alone is weak evidence. Several together, changing over months, is not.
Why Houston houses move at all
Two figures explain most of it. Up to 51% of the mapped ground here is clay, and a ten-year storm drops 8.7 inches in a day. Clay expands as it takes that water up and contracts as it dries out again, so the soil a foundation bears on does not stay the same size through the year. Movement here is ordinary; the question is always whether it has stopped.
Old cracks and new ones in an aging stock
Count first, and remember what stock you are counting in. Houston’s median year structure built is 1981, so the middle house in this city has already been through decades of ground that swelled and shrank. Aging houses carry aging cracks. One left over from a dry spell before you bought the place and one that opened this spring look identical in a photograph, and on a first walk around a house of that age most of what you find is history rather than news.
Time separates them, not width. Photograph each one with something for scale beside it, put the date on the file, and look again in three months. One stiff door proves nothing and a hairline in a garage slab is usually curing. Four separate signs inside the same quarter of the house, all of them different between two dated photographs, is something else.
The thing that actually resolves it is an elevation survey: floor heights measured relative to each other across the whole structure, which converts a list of complaints into figures. Afterward every discussion, whether with a contractor, an engineer, an insurer or a buyer, opens with those figures instead of with an anecdote. None of it can be read off an image. A firm that offers a verdict from photographs is describing the local average and calling it your house.
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