"poor foundation" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use this phrase to describe someone or something lacking in or failing to have a sufficient basis for being successful. For example, "John's essay was given a low grade due to its poor foundation of research."
As a result, he said, the nuclear industry's "thinking about safety had a poor foundation".
I wouldn't be the first to say that a lie is a poor foundation on which to build a family (or anything else, for that matter).
Several education experts agreed that the lackluster performance among high school students might reflect a poor foundation in the basics of reading, math and science at earlier grades.
The sociologist Max Weber and other scholars have argued that Islam is inherently a poor foundation for capitalism, and some have pointed in particular to Islamic qualms about paying interest on loans.
The resort is on Anguilla, in the British West Indies, a flat, uninspiring-looking island about 16 miles long, formed on limestone rock, a poor foundation to nourish vegetation.
Paul L. Whiteley Sr .Louisville, Ky., April 23, 2008 To the Editor: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is doing her country and her party a service by exposing the poor foundation on which this romance with Senator Barack Obama is based.
Several of these megaliths had surprisingly poor foundations, and were now standing thanks only to wooden supports.
In Edgar Allan Poe's tale The Fall of the House of Usher, a house is swallowed up so that nothing is left, not because of poor foundations but mental sickness: the madness that afflicts the Usher family finally consumes the very fabric of their ancient home.
"Landslides are a problem for rapidly-built houses with poor foundations.
It has a 78 feet high tower, which leans significantly from the vertical, caused by its poor foundations.
Construction in the City went unregulated, and most of the roughly 350 buildings were built with poor foundations and few or no utilities.
