Why Cary Homes Move: Cut-and-Fill Subdivisions on Piedmont Clay
Cary grew faster than almost any town in the Southeast between 1985 and 2015, and that pace shows up in the dirt. Many subdivisions - Preston, Lochmere, Amberly, Carpenter Village, and the West Cary corridor - were built by cutting the high side of a lot and dumping the soil on the low side to create a flat building pad. When that fill is not compacted to spec, the downhill corners of the house settle 1-3 inches over the first 10-15 years. Combine that with Cary's plastic Piedmont clay that swells and shrinks with the seasons, and you get the classic Cary failure pattern: stair-step brick cracks on the back wall, sticking doors at the back of the house, and a hairline gap between the trim and the floor in one corner. A licensed structural engineer in Cary has to know which subdivisions were built on which fill conditions - we do.