What are foundation and soil conditions in ZIP code 73170 (Oklahoma City)?

Reviewed by Preston · Updated 2026-11-12

In short: ZIP code 73170 is clay country: about 40% of the area is mapped in soils rated high shrink-swell ¹. The soil survey also maps occasional or frequent flooding on about 17% ¹.

What does the soil survey show for 73170?

ZIP code 73170 covers about 21 square miles of land and had 41,343 people in the 2020 Census ²; its center falls in Oklahoma City.

Which soils matter most for houses in 73170?

• Norge, about 7% of the area ¹: Very deep, well drained, moderately slowly permeable upland soils that formed in loamy alluvium of Pleistocene age ³.
• Renfrow, about 7% of the area ¹: Very deep well drained soils that formed in material weathered from clayey shale of Permian age ⁴.
• Teller, about 6% of the area ¹: Very deep, well drained, moderately permeable soils that formed in loamy sediments of Pleistocene age ⁵.
• Bethany, about 6% of the area ¹: Very deep, well drained soils that formed in loess or alluvium of Pleistocene age over shale of Permian age ⁶.
• Gracemore, about 5% of the area ¹: Very deep, somewhat poorly drained, moderately rapid to rapidly permeable soils formed in calcareous sandy alluvium of Recent age ⁷.
• Kirkland, about 16%, is land the survey does not rate as soil ¹.

What does this mean for houses in 73170?

Clay that swells and shrinks. Where high shrink-swell soil sits under a house, wet spells lift the slab edges and drought drops them, and uneven watering does more harm than uniform change. See perimeter wetting heave, edge drop in drought and tree-root drying.

Flood-prone soils. Floodplain soils are layered stream deposits: softer, wetter and more variable than upland soils, and they flood. See soft soil consolidation and Quaternary alluvium and terraces.

Which soils cover 73170?

Looking for a foundation company near ZIP code 73170?

Companies that serve ZIP code 73170 can appear on the company map in the Homeowner Hub. Paid listings there are marked Sponsored; the library and the AI guide don't rank or recommend any of them.

Buying or selling a house in ZIP code 73170? Realtors who serve the area can be on the same map, also marked Sponsored, and for realtors covers the seller disclosure form, inspections and the sale timeline. Seeing cracks at home? Start with for homeowners.

How were these numbers measured?

We overlaid the ZIP code tabulation area (the Census approximation of a ZIP code) from the Census Bureau ² on the USDA soil survey's map units ¹ and added up the area of each soil. Where a map unit is a mix of soils, its area was split by the percentages the survey lists for its major soils, so shares leave out minor inclusions and do not add to 100%. Shrink-swell is rated by the linear extensibility of a soil's most expansive layer, the survey's measure of how much it changes length between wet and dry (6% or more is high). Water table, bedrock and flooding come from the survey's map-unit summaries: the shallowest water table in any month, the shallowest bedrock, and the most common flooding frequency. Bedrock here includes soft, weathered sandstone and shale that a pier can push through, so it is not the depth where piers stop. These are mapped averages, not a test of any one lot; fill, grading and the soil actually under a house can differ, which is why a site visit or soil boring still decides a repair.

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• Shrink-swell and the active zone