It is horrific how wasteful and destructive we are with building materials, often irreplaceable ones or extremely energy intensive ones, only to replace them with inferior materials that are flimsier and less durable but far easier to build with. The disposable culture has hit our houses harder than almost anything else in our lives, but they still last long enough that we don’t think of if that way. Instead we (more specifically, the national and multi-national development companies that have regulatory-captured our municipal governments) have made this into a business model, and nobody pays any attention to it because 20 years is longer than most of us stay in a house and we’re too busy being concerned about whether throwing away plastic straws is too wasteful. Meanwhile they’re over there bulldozing entire houses and foundations directly into landfills just to build another one in its place out of toothpicks on a flimsy foundation in improperly prepared soil for twice the price the previous one sold for, without telling you that it is doomed to inevitably fail so it “has to be” bulldozed in a decade or two as well, because it’s too fragile and difficult to maintain for anyone to economically justify attempting to make it last even if they wanted to, which they’ll make sure you don’t. It looks nice at first, until you eventually get so sick of its problems you say “good riddance”. And then off to landfill it goes to make space for another flimsy shitbox.