Utah homes less than 4 years old are sinking — owners struggle with cracked walls, sloped floors, and ‘dangerous’ radon. How to avoid this nightmare

The Rios family paid $700,000 for their home — and have since moved out. They say the settling has caused a separation in the roof that allowed rainwater to pour into their garage, and they worry about pulled wires sparking a fire or gas lines breaking.

"This is our biggest investment," Rios said. "We have no other debt except for our house."

They're not alone. Twenty-one homeowners in the Winn Ridge neighborhood of Nephi have filed a lawsuit in state court alleging their homes — all built in 2022 and 2023 — are settling and cracking at alarming rates. The complaint describes drywall cracks around doors and windows, sloping floors, doors that no longer latch and fissured basement floors that are allowing dangerous levels of radon into the homes.

A geotechnical report that was allegedly ignored

According to the lawsuit, the trouble starts underground.

A geotechnical report prepared for the builders warned that soils in Winn Ridge had "moderate to high collapse potential." The report called for 6 to 10 inches of compacted fill soil beneath foundations, along with the installation of foundation drains.

The plaintiffs allege the builders — Riding Siding Construction and Salisbury Homes — ignored both requirements. Instead of properly compacted fill, they placed loose 12-inch lifts while also failing to install foundation drains. Additionally, the homeowners accuse the geotechnical firm that prepared the report, GeoStrata, of failing to conduct required inspections.

"The fraud the homeowners have alleged are that there were important facts about these lots and the way the soil was prepared — or not prepared — that were not disclosed," homeowners' attorney Chase Wilde told FOX 13.

The attorneys representing Riding Siding, Salisbury Homes and GeoStrata declined to comment, citing pending litigation. Property records show Riding Siding has bought back one house in the neighborhood.

A six-figure fix on a starter-home budget

For families who are choosing to stay, the path forward is piering — a process that involves digging underneath the home, lifting the structure and installing steel support piers beneath it.

Brandee and Michael Wing, fellow plaintiffs in the suit, got an estimate from a foundation repair company. The cost: more than $267,000. That's over half of what they paid for their home — and it wouldn't cover repairing existing damage or any new damage caused by the lifting process.

"Piering. A lot of money. A lot of money and piering," Michael Wing told FOX 13.

The families say they don't want to leave. They moved to Winn Ridge for homes they could afford, in a neighborhood where they could raise their kids.

"The layout of the whole house is beautiful," Michael Wing said, "and it's what we wanted. So, we are hoping to stay here."

Not an isolated case

The Winn Ridge families may be in a small Utah town, but similar disputes are playing out across the country. In South Carolina, construction defect attorney John Hayes told WCSC he files lawsuits representing hundreds of homeowners every year. He described the pattern as a "house trap" — families who have poured their life savings into their biggest purchase, only to find structural defects they can't afford to fix and can't sell their way out of (2).

In Texas, where rapid homebuilding over the past 15 years has added millions of units to the state's housing stock, attorneys say defect lawsuits are surging as that wave of construction ages into its discovery window (3).

Industry estimates suggest roughly half of all U.S. homes sit on expansive soil — clay, silt and other types prone to dramatic swelling and shrinking with changes in moisture. A widely cited 1973 ASCE study put the annual structural damage from expansive soils at $2.3 billion. Adjusted for inflation, more recent academic estimates place the figure closer to $15 billion a year (4)(5).

A labor shortage is compounding the problem

A joint study from the Home Builders Institute and the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) found the economic toll of the skilled labor shortage on single-family home building reached $10.8 billion per year as of 2025. That includes roughly $2.7 billion in higher carrying costs from stretched build timelines and $8.1 billion in lost production from approximately 19,000 homes that simply didn't get built (6).

The average construction timeline has expanded by nearly two months because of the labor gap (6). When there aren't enough skilled tradespeople, builders hire less experienced crews and face pressure to move fast. Soil prep gets rushed. Waterproofing steps get skipped. One analysis from a construction litigation firm noted that forensic investigations of new housing routinely uncover shortcuts not visible on a finished home's exterior — but surface within a few years as leaks, mold and structural cracking (7).

Construction employment grew just 8.8% from 2021 to 2024, trailing the 9.4% growth rate across all industries (8). Immigrant workers now make up 25.5% of the construction workforce, a historic high, but the pipeline of new workers entering the trades has narrowed. NAHB estimates, as cited by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, put the annual flow of new immigrants into construction at 45,000 per year from 2010 to 2019, down from 88,000 annually between 2003 and 2009 (9)(10).

What it costs to fix — and why most can't

The national average for a foundation repair job runs roughly $4,500 to $5,200, but piering — the standard approach for stabilizing a sinking foundation — costs $1,000 to $3,000 per pier, with most homes needing 7 to 10. Total piering costs typically range from $7,000 to $30,000 (11).