[airhadoken]

Thank you parent poster. This was the other part I wanted to cover in my post above but didn't think I could find hard data for. It seems like the contracting business has attracted large amounts of ethically-challenged scum, who are building houses that aren't likely to last as long as the mortgages paying for them. It kind of explains why new-home starts have seemed to be recession-proof in the last decade -- Say's Law lives in a very real sense here -- but at the same time it's hard to build stable neighborhoods around disposable homes.