MESQUITE

Mesquite filled in mostly between the fifties and the seventies, which puts it in the same category as Garland and Richardson: older shallow slabs on Blackland clay, with landscaping that has had half a century to mature.

A slab poured in 1964 was not built to the standards used now, and the trees planted when those houses were new are now pulling serious volumes of water out of the ground every summer day.

The compensation is that the ground has been through sixty cycles already and has largely settled into its rhythm, so movement here is usually slower and often cheaper to correct than in a new build.

What the ground under Mesquite is actually doing

Mesquite is the most evenly mixed of the Dallas suburbs we cover. No single soil takes even a tenth of it: Axtell at a linear extensibility of 4.9, Heiden at 13.3, and Mabank at 5.2 each hold a similar share.

That patchwork is the defining fact about foundations here. Mesquite has both moderate ground and genuinely expansive ground in roughly equal measure, distributed unevenly, so city-wide advice is close to useless. What your neighbourhood is on is a real question in Mesquite in a way that it is not in Wylie, where the answer is always the same.