I was talking with a tile guy one day (Word of advice: Don't ever hire a Brazilian
tile guy right before the World Cup Finals), and we were lamenting the fact that my typical South Florida tract home, thanks to shoddy construction, had no square corners. Nor were any of the walls plumb or the ceilings level--something I learned when I installed my own crown molding.

In fact, I was in the attic once and happened to look down into the interior of a wall below me. Buried down there was a time capsule of discarded cigarette packs, disposable lighters, sardine cans and other detritus left behind by the construction workers decades before.

Anyway, the tile guy told me he kept running into the same tradespeople at construction sites all the time, whether the house was relatively humble, like mine, or a waterfront McMansion. "The quality's all the same, " he said. "You may pay more for a bigger house on the water, but it'll fall down just as fast as yours."

That was heartwarming. And it helped explain why Parkland, which is adjacent to the land being transferred from Palm Beach to Broward County, and which is a relatively well-to-do community, should find itself one of the more high-profile victims of the Chinese drywall debacle. Let the buyer beware: no one is immune. One gets the impression that Florida developers would buy drywall from Borneo made of compressed bat guano if it came in cheaper than the Chinese stuff.