Speed Is the Enemy of the Building That Lasts

Texas construction employment reached 921,600 in September 2026, up 1.7% year over year, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the same quarter, 87% of respondents reported openings for hourly craft positions, and 50%, half of the respondents, said candidates were not qualified, according to an Associated General Contractors survey reported by the San Antonio Express-News. The labor is not arriving fast enough. The projects are.

Now add the capital. The Port of Brownsville reports more than $30 billion in potential investment in its pipeline, including a liquefied natural gas facility and the first new Gulf Coast refinery in 50 years. Growth corridors across South Texas are compressing construction timelines to capture that money. Speed becomes the measure of success. Oversight becomes the line item that gets cut.

Simon G. Solorio, PE, the principal and project manager of Solorio, Inc., has spent more than 30 years as a structural engineer in South Texas. He has watched this pattern before. Much of his current work is repairing buildings from the 1980s boom, structures that went up quickly and were built incorrectly. He says, "There was no oversight; they were built too fast."

The mechanism is not complicated. An out-of-town design team can produce structurally sound drawings. What it cannot do is watch the work. In small South Texas towns, building departments do not send inspectors constantly. They rely on the engineer. "If the engineer doesn't come, the contractor just does whatever he wants," Solorio says.

That is the gap. The design is fine. The execution drifts. Nobody catches it until the building is up and the repair is expensive.

The labor shortage sharpens the problem. Experienced crews are harder to find. Half of the firms in the AGC survey said applicants lacked the skills the work requires. Solorio shares that his team now visits sites four or five times a week instead of once or twice, because the workers on site need more supervision than the ones they used to have. The extra repair cost lands on the owner in the future, when the issues arise.

Local conditions compound it. The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation states that expansive soils are a very common cause of foundation problems and that they damage 25% of all structures, with greater financial losses than earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined.

On the coast, the Texas Department of Insurance requires structures in designated catastrophe areas to be constructed and inspected according to the building specifications adopted by TDI. An engineer from Chicago can design a sound building and still miss it. When that happens, the owner hires a second engineer to check the first engineer's work, and the schedule absorbs another delay.

The scale of the error matters as much as the error itself. Solorio describes one wrong foundation design repeated 100 times across a single manufacturing plant. On a small project, one foundation type is an easy fix. At $50 million, the same mistake is a line item that reshapes the budget. "The scale of it increases the cost of fixing it," he says.

He also draws a distinction the industry often blurs. Code compliance and performance are not the same thing. A floor can meet the load requirement and still deflect enough to crack the tile the owner installs two years later. The code sets a minimum. Performance asks whether the building will still work in a decade. Those are different questions, and only one of them shows up in a permit review.

The long-term bill is visible in Solorio's current workload. He is repairing buildings that are 10, 30, and 40 years old, most of them with the same root cause. No construction oversight from an engineer or qualified inspector, and no one on site to confirm the contractor was building what the drawings specified.

None of this argues against growth. The investment is real, and the buildings are needed. The argument is about who watches them being built. An owner who hires a designer and stops there has bought a drawing, not a building. The oversight phase is where the drawing becomes the thing that stands.

Solorio's advice to owners is simple. Ask who will be on site, how often, and whether the person who designed the structure will be the person checking it. "They might go once a month," he says of the firms he competes with. "We're there constantly." The building that lasts is the one nobody rushed. So when the next $50 million facility breaks ground, who will be on site to slow it down enough to get it right?