I never heard that kind of talk, but I grew up in a pretty bad area. The fanciest homes were the decrepit rowhouses surrounded by low income tenements. I can imagine us talking about building on the ashes of those places, but not moving in.
As for field service, the forms were pretty vanilla. You entered numbers and no one really checked up on them. The closest we typically came to any kind of creativity was to round the hours up. You could probably double your reported time if you didn't feel guilty about it.