Piers bear on ground below the layer that moves, so the support itself is not the thing with a lifespan. What decides whether the house moves again is whether the moisture swing that caused the first movement was addressed.

What keeps moving under Houston after the piers go in

Up to 51% of the mapped soil here is clay and an ordinary two-year storm drops 5.1 inches in a day. Support reaches below that active layer; the ground around and between the piers does not stop responding to it. That is the whole argument for treating drainage as part of the repair rather than as a later improvement.

The reasoning behind that

A pier is a column bearing on competent ground. Steel and concrete in soil are not what fails. What fails is the assumption that the rest of the house is now stable, when the mechanism that moved it in the first place is still operating on the parts that were never supported. This is why partial work sometimes produces new symptoms. Supporting one side of a structure while the other side continues to ride the seasonal swing can increase the difference between them, which is the thing that cracks walls. The durable outcome comes from pairing the two: support where the movement has already happened, and moisture management so the untouched ground stops swinging as far. Grading and downspouts are the cheapest half of that pairing and the most frequently skipped. Warranties in this trade are commonly written against the installed support rather than against the house staying level. Read which one is being offered, because they are very different promises.

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