The land turned out to be unsuitable for the large scale habitation envisioned by the planners, as Professor Thomas's An Appalachian New Deal relates, since a "stratum of porous rock lay beneath the land [and] caused great expense in making the water supply safe"[9].

Not to be outdone, Louis Howe, one of the project managers, promptly purchased fifty pre-fabricated summer cottages that were "totally inadequate for West Virginia winters" (Thomas 1998, p. 170), not to mention that they didn't fit the pre-fabricated foundations waiting for them. Architects had to be brought in from New York "at great expense" to make the summer cottages suitable for West Virginia (and make them fit their foundations), pushing back the initial move-in date six months.[10]

Mrs. Nancy Hoffman's Eleanor Roosevelt and the Arthurdale Experiment called it "the first and most notable fiasco" during the community's construction, but the purchase of the stratum of porous rock has my vote.

Delivered late and vastly over budget,[11] Arthurdale displayed all the characteristics of a boondoggle, a political creature that "puts people over profits" and is widely familiar to all Americans, circa 2007. The pre-fabricated houses, even when it was known that they were unsuitable for West Virginia winter and wouldn't fit their foundations, were still built but then torn to pieces and remodeled. An article in the August 1934 Saturday Evening Post speaks of how chimneys were built eight feet away from their houses' sides, after which the houses were reconstructed to meet the chimneys.