10/03/2026
No basements in Texas. Here’s the reason.
People move here from up north, buy a house, and then go looking for the basement. 🏠
There is not one. Almost nowhere in Texas has a basement, and every newcomer has the identical reaction, which is that this cannot possibly be correct. Where do the Christmas decorations go. Where do you go in a storm. The answer to the first is the attic or the garage, and the answer to the second is an interior room with no windows, and neither answer satisfies anybody for about the first two years.
The reason is the ground itself. A great deal of Texas sits on expansive clay that swells when it rains and shrinks when it dries out, which means it moves, and it moves with enough force to crack a buried wall. Add a high water table across much of the state, plus a frost line so shallow that builders never had to dig deep for a footing in the first place, and a basement goes from something you get nearly for free to an expensive problem you volunteered for. So we build on a slab. And then we spend the rest of our lives watering the foundation in August so it does not shift under us.
That last part is what really gets people. 💧 Yes, you run a sprinkler around the outside of your own house during a drought. No, it is not optional.
For anyone who moved here, what was the thing about Texas houses that nobody warned you about?