Where we cover

One county, one problem underneath it

San Angelo is a city of 99,893 people sitting at the junction of the North and South Concho Rivers, and the whole of Tom Green County shares the ground that makes foundation work so common here. Two of the clay series mapped around the city are Vertisols — soils defined by shrinking and swelling — and the USDA's reference profiles for both were taken inside this county: Tobosa about ten miles northeast of town, and Lipan 7.2 miles southeast of the courthouse near Veribest.

What changes from neighborhood to neighborhood is not the soil so much as what is built on it and what the water is doing. Older parts of the city carry more pier and beam houses, where the structure is reachable from underneath. Areas built out in the 1960s and 70s are mostly slab. Bigger lots outside the city limits tend to have more uneven surface drainage. Each area page below covers what actually matters there.

That distinction is worth spelling out, because it decides what a repair looks like. On a pier and beam house somebody can get underneath and see the failed support directly, so the diagnosis is close to certain and the work is usually confined to the parts that have moved. On a slab, nothing under the concrete can be observed at all — the shape of the floor has to be measured from above and the plan inferred from those numbers. Same county, same clay, two completely different jobs, and the difference in price between them is substantial. What each kind of repair costs, with every figure sourced →

The third variable is water, and it is the one nobody thinks of as foundation work. Where roof water goes, which way the ground falls, whether a bed against the wall is watered on a schedule the rest of the soil never sees — those decide whether the soil around a house stays even or swings between extremes, and evenness is the whole game on clay. It is also the cheapest thing on this entire site to put right, which is why it gets checked before anything structural is discussed.

If your street is not named below, it does not mean it is not covered. The list is neighborhoods and towns people actually search for, not a boundary.