Our landlord also loved using the really caustic industrial drain cleaner because he was too cheap to hire a proper plumber to snake out our back bathroom sink (it's part of the renovations I was talking about). I have a feeling the dozens of applications didn't do our clay sewer pipe any favours

Our next door neighbours failed a couple of years after ours. Apparently many of the houses on our street had theirs taken out the last time they paved and the owners who didn't were told it was a matter of time.

I imagine they were cheaper products used (at the time) due to the reconstruction in our city after the Halifax explosion (look it up if you haven't heard about it, a WWI munitions ship exploded and basically levelled half our city). I was impressed they had a 100 year lifespan, I didn't know they lasted longer!

Agree 100%. I live in Halifax (the Canadian one!) which is on the short list of oldest Canadian cities. There is 6-7 square kilometers of residential development where I live that was all built in the 1920s-1930s and over 95% of them are still standing, many with renovations and add-ons over the years. Including my own; it was reno'd in the 70s or early 80s and it's... very apparent which sections are built cheaper.

Also agreed on the 1950s-1960s builds. A friend has a house from the mid 50s in a subdivision about 10km from here and it's a very well built house. Not as overbuilt as mine but from an era of cheap lumber, before plywood became common in residential construction. It's the perfect middleground and is what my partner and I are looking for in a house when we buy... if we can get over the 60s asthetics of most of those builds

There are hundreds of not thousands of houses in this area of my (very old) city that date back to the 1920s (rebuilding after the Halifax explosion). Most streets are all original to that decade; there is the odd new build but due to things like fire or neglect. I wouldn't call it survivorship bias. There's easily three times more construction material in houses of this era than new prefabs.

They literally don't make stuff like they used to. The house we rent is just about 100 years old and the chain link fence posts are original. The clay (!) pipes that run the sewer to the municipal system only failed 3 years ago.

(I'm glad we rent a hundred year old house because that fix cost our landlord like 30K lol)