Foundation repair in Alamo Heights' irreplaceable old homes.

The area's other signature is the remodel: these homes carry second stories, kitchen expansions, and stone additions their original foundations were never sized for. New load on ninety-year-old footing is its own diagnosis, and it's one we make carefully.

MONTCLAIR AND BLUEBONNET HILLS TO SYLVAN HILLS, BROADWAY'S BLOCKS TO THE OLMOS BASIN EDGE, TERRELL HILLS AND OLMOS PARK ALONGSIDE — TEN MINUTES FROM OUR SHOP, HANDLED WITH CONSERVATOR'S CARE.

The ground on the escarpment edge

The Heights sits right on the Balcones transition — limestone one lot, clay the next.

Alamo Heights sits about five miles north of downtown, right where the Balcones Escarpment turns limestone into the expansive Upper-Cretaceous and Blackland clay of the flats. The geologic outcrop can change within a few feet, so one lot may sit on shallow rock while the next bridges a clay pocket — and those clays move six to eight inches with the seasons, hard and shrunken when dry, greasy and swollen when wet. That's the core foundation driver up here, and it produces the transition-soil signature: a single wall run or corner tracking a pocket while the rest of the house reads level, sharply defined rather than whole-perimeter cycling.

Layer on the canopy. The heritage oaks that define these streets — many older than the houses — dry the soil hard in drought, and slab and beam lines inside root reach settle first. So the honest first moves in the Heights are often tree-respecting ones: root barriers, watering programs, and drainage corrections before anything structural. And because so many of these homes carry a century of settled character, the question is rarely "is it cracked" but "is it still moving" — which only repeat elevation measurement answers, not a glance.

Pre-war homes, remodel-era loads

1920s–'40s stock the Olmos Dam made possible — and the additions that followed.

Alamo Heights incorporated on June 20, 1922, one of San Antonio's oldest affluent suburbs, and its signature housing followed the 1926 completion of the Olmos Dam — built after the catastrophic 1921 flood to take the downtown flood threat off the table. With the Olmos Basin controlled, the Heights built out through the 1920s, '30s, and '40s in Spanish Colonial Revival and Mediterranean (clay-tile roofs, stucco, arches) and Tudor Revival, on generous quarter- to half-acre lots. Foundation work in that stock is closer to conservation than construction — smaller lifts, slower passes, and accepting "stabilized and substantially improved" when a full lift would crack irreplaceable plaster and vintage masonry.

The area's other signature is the remodel. These homes carry second stories, kitchen expansions, and stone additions their original footings were never sized for, and new load on ninety-year-old foundations shows up as fresh cracks within a couple of years of the renovation — the fix is targeted support under the new load paths, not a blanket perimeter run. From Montclair's early blocks east of Broadway to Bluebonnet Hills and Sylvan Hills, alongside the tri-city neighbors Terrell Hills and Olmos Park, we measure each section on every inspection, because plenty of Heights homes are both original and added-on, and it's the joint between the two that cracks first.

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