As Houses Tilt, a Market Teeters; Sinking Foundations Imperil a Town's Property Values
For years, Nancy S. Parsons thought that her house was the only one in this sprawling suburb of Buffalo that was sinking.
It began in the mid-1990's when she felt a chill in her finished basement and noticed a crack of daylight where a wall had pulled away from the house. Then doors stopped closing properly. Cracks, some large enough to accommodate a hand, spread through her basement walls. Smaller ones eventually appeared in the wallboard upstairs. A gas meter pulled away from the house, triggering a leak.
''It was such a mess that I wouldn't have people over,'' said Ms. Parsons, a schoolteacher. Then her sister came up with a novel solution for the kitchen by hand painting faux cracks near the real ones for a Romanesque trattoria look.
But it turned out Ms. Parsons was not alone. In fact, hundreds of houses here are sinking into the earth, with one side of a house typically dropping inches more than the other. The effect is that of a slow-motion earthquake: basement floors heave upward, supporting beams twist perilously and rooms list to one side.