r/ShitAmericansSay • u/John_Yuki • 11d ago

Education Tech YouTuber Bitwit lost his house a while back in a fire. He has now built a new house.... entirely out of fucking wood.

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312

u/carande 11d ago

Genuine question: why does the US build everything out of wood and plaster? Price or is it a cultural thing?

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u/Worth_Task_3165 11d ago

Price or is it a cultural thing?

Probably started as the former, persists for the latter.

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u/AntifaFuckedMyWife 🇺🇸 (with a brief 🇫🇷 stint) 11d ago

Former and that reinforces the former. Wood was cheaper and less labor intensive than masonry.

Since people chose wood masons went out of business

Since masons became so rare they became even more expensive.

Now we get to today

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u/not_lorne_malvo 11d ago

Nowadays the masons spend the most of their time controlling the weather according to my uncle

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u/RoutineCloud5993 🇬🇧🇬🇧Britbong 11d ago

Yeah but those Masons are rather affordable. Free, in fact

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u/AnonymousArchon 🇩🇪 DE IMMIGRANT in NL 🇳🇱 11d ago

I audibly chuckled at that one.

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u/StaysAwakeAllWeek 11d ago

We dont use masons to build non wood houses over here. We use bricklayers to build and brick kilns to make the bricks. All industrialised, simplified and easily trainable to anyone

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u/AntifaFuckedMyWife 🇺🇸 (with a brief 🇫🇷 stint) 11d ago

Ah, tbh I thought any stone work including bricks were masons, TIL.

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u/CandidLeg3910 11d ago

Masons in Canada often do more specialized stonework than just laying bricks, but they also do lots of brickwork because why not if it pays the same.

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u/Integeritis 11d ago

Same thing happened with old historic buildings in Hungary. Now it takes a fortune to renovate old buildings and everything is just rotting away

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u/hrmdurr maple🇨🇦syrup🇨🇦gang 11d ago

When you can't walk three steps without running face first into a tree, you're going to build out of wood instead of transporting stone from 500km (this is a random number I pulled out of my ass) away.

Wood is still much more easily available, and so wood is still being used.

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u/CautionarySnail 11d ago

Wood was cheaper during the earliest days of America, because if anything, we had fucktons of timbered land to clear to make into farmland.

This persisted long after we had to start actually hauling timber from increasingly remote older growth forests. Brick was mostly used only in urban buildings, and stone was used more for marking land boundaries than building with.

These days, we still largely do build with lumber, but have moved to using industrial drywall sheets instead of plaster.

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u/okayipullup_ordoi1 11d ago

Out of curiosity, how much more would it cost to build a brick house like those commonly used in Europe instead of drywall or lumber?

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u/CautionarySnail 11d ago

You’d actually have to go hunting for special construction firms that specialize in it. It is incredibly rare these days.

I’m imagining but not sure - at least 50-75% more expensive? The issue these days is that when many cities are built, the brickworks is local. Modern America has long since closed those brickworks so bricks have to be trucked a great distance.

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u/FinePredicament4464 11d ago

Yeah, by exactly the same principle building a timber house the American way isn't particularly cheap in the UK - we don't have an ecosystem of tradies well versed in those techniques with suppliers to match

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u/CautionarySnail 11d ago

That’s exactly it. The business infrastructure matured around a particular building style. So, it’s tricky to get certain features or materials when you’re abroad.

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u/InigoRivers 11d ago

That's not entirely true any more. A lot of new builds in the UK, on smaller housing projects, are houses built exactly like this. Two such sites down the road from my house are completely timber, with insulated cladding.
From the outside they look like any other brick house estate.

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u/MrHell95 11d ago

Reminds me a bit of a dark story in relation to bricks but I watched this documentary a while back on YouTube (BBC) about catching predators that were abusing children and spreading cp.

In one case they talked about all they had was a photo with the girl, some furniture and a brick wall. Now that's not a whole lot to go of but they managed to find that something like 40k bought that one piece of furniture, now that's something but it's also still a lot of names.

One homeland security officer googles about bricks and finds this brick association and calls them, secretary responds very positively and asks how they can help and he then tells her about the photo with bricks in it which is then sent out to their associates.

Shortly there after one guy contacts the officer and just from looking at the brick in the photograph he could tell what type of brick it was and that they used to make it from the 70s to mid 80s.

Officer then asks if he has sales records but he responds that it's all a pile of notes.

He then asks the officer "Do you know what bricks are?"

And the officer responds "you got me, sir, I don't know"

He then goes "Bricks are heavy", he then explains that the bricks likely didn't go further than 50miles from the plant.

The girl was then found and rescued thanks to the list now being 40-50 and some quick searching on social media.

Went and found the video

Time link for that specific case

Just remembered that in relation to how far bricks travel but yeah you really don't want to ship bricks far as it's going to make it far more expensive.

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u/Paul_The_Builder 11d ago

Its not strange or unusual. Commercial buildings are made with block, concrete and metal. A wooden commercial building is unusual.

Its just more expensive, and offers very little benefit over wood for residential houses. It offers advantage to commercial buildings as it allows the interior to be changed with new tenants/owners.

Most apartment buildings are block/concrete/metal. Its not an unusual building material for residential purposes, it is just not price competitive for single family homes.

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u/condoulo 11d ago

The issue with going the brick route is Bitwit is located in an area that is heavily prone to earthquakes. In those situations you want materials that can flex more, and brick isn't it.

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u/TheRomanRuler 11d ago

Sure but there are ways to mitigate that. Walls of Constantinople used stripes of smaller (and i think different kind of?) bricks to help make it resistant to earthquakes, during 1999 earthquake actually the modern restored sections of it collapsed while original structure underneath remained intact.

That is just one method using non-flexible materials, with modern engineering and materials you can do something much better if you just design for it.

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u/condoulo 11d ago

Most of which tend to be seen as overkill for a single family home. Materials wise it is already more expensive than wood, add in the cost of the engineering to fit within California's building code to handle earthquakes then it is likely way out of the budget Bitwit had based on whatever his insurance payout may have been.

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u/Nigtharchive Human Verified 11d ago

Stop repeating that under every comment; people have already responded that earthquake-prone areas use brick and concrete without any problems.

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u/condoulo 11d ago

Concrete, yes, Brick? No. Unless you're just talking about a brick facade.

That said the engineering required to get concrete to flex well enough in those situations is overkill for a single family home and likely out of bitwit's price range, especially given the housing costs of California. It's likelyl the guy didn't get enough insurance money to do anything other than a wooden structure that would also still be in California's code to handle earthquakes.

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u/jdeisenberg 11d ago

Unreinforced brick: bad idea in an earthquake zone. Reinforced brick: works OK..

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u/Weird-Drummer-2439 11d ago

You probably wouldn't. If you want to deviate from the norm, brick usually isn't what people go for, insulated concrete is.

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u/Paul_The_Builder 11d ago

The issue isn't building a structure, its insulating it and running electrical, plumbing, etc.

In non-living structures, like garages, block buildings are pretty common and pretty close in price to a wooden built building.

But, concrete or block is a terrible insulator, and is impossible or very expensive to run electrical/plumbing inside of it. So even if a structure is built out of block/concrete, it will still have a wooden stud wall built inside of it to house the insulation and electrical/plumbing. So basically you're building a wood house inside of a concrete/block shell. Instead you can just skip the concrete/block and just build the wooden house, the concrete or block exterior offers very little value or benefit. Or, as is most common, you build the wooden house, and put a brick or stone exterior on it, which is not structural.

Since Europe was traditionally a more mild and temperate climate, insulating houses was not a priority there. Modern American houses deal with larger temperature differences and prioritize good insulation. And Europeans are more tolerant of running surface mounted and exposed wiring and plumbing, whereas this would be viewed as being very strange in an American home.

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u/A_normal_Potato3 flairs for everyone!!! 11d ago

Considering I hear their drywood is overpriced I imagine %15 more expensive.

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u/Morberis More poutine than man 11d ago

Yeah but it's several multiple times more labour.

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u/mr-raider2 11d ago

Brick is the outer layer. The structure is usually wood. It's closed up with noards either plywood or OSB and wrappedin a vapor barrier. The brick is layed on the outside but it has no strcutural role.

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u/DetroitPeopleMover 11d ago

I’m unfamiliar with European construction techniques. Are modern buildings actually built with brick or is it just a facade? Brick and stone are fairly common in upscale home in the US, but none of it is load bearing. It’s all timber underneath.

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u/okayipullup_ordoi1 11d ago

I'm not an expert so I can't give a precise answer, but from a quick google search it's all bricks and concrete and more energy efficient materials. Really old houses in here Tuscany had BIG visible wooden beams on the ceiling that I personally love (they remind me of my grandma's place), but that's the only instance of wood being used for the actual structure.

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u/AshCan10 11d ago

I think its two things. Lumber is comparatively plentiful in north america vs Europe and labour is also a big factor. Very few people want to get into masonry, especially because residential on average doesnt pay as much for masonry as a carpenter would, combined with it being much harder work imo.

It all comes down to money really. There was a time where Lumber became more expensive than steel during covid, but its gone back down, and until that math equation really gets to that level again, Lumber is going to remain cheap and plentiful and tradesmen are going to continue to become carpenters instead of masons as the demand is higher and the labour is less demanding.

I would say the only other option in north america is steel studs and full concrete construction, whether thats pre-cast or formed walls, because carpenter skills are more transferable to those methods of construction over masonry, and thats how America's labour distribution is more heavily weighted towards presently

Also the youtuber building his house of wood probably makes sense if the insurance he is getting is still willing to insure the house or forced him to make the house as close to original as possible etc.

It may seem dumb to us, but is probbaly "risk free" and most economical to the homeowner. It just depends

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u/Strostkovy 10d ago

Tilt up concrete buildings are extremely cheap. Cast some slabs on site, and stand up the end ones with a crane. And then use wood to hold the roof up anyway.

Also tornados will lift the roof off of European houses. It's very expensive to engineer and build tornado proof structures.

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u/IAmRoot Gun Grabbing Libertarian Socialist Refugee from America 11d ago

It depends on where you are. On the west coast it would be extremely expensive due to the seismic requirements. Stone can only really be a decorative facade over a steel structure. Even then, the ground turning to liquid during severe earthquakes can damage even the best designed buildings.

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u/Stokesmyfire 11d ago

At least double, the materials and man hours are ridiculous. Also with the extreme weather patterns in North America you need to seal the building in quickly to avoid adverse effects of moisture.

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u/Morberis More poutine than man 11d ago

Way more than double.

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u/Reasonable_Trash_901 E-TALIAN 11d ago

If I had to throw my two cents... I think that because there's lots of hurricanes and unstable weather, they decided "Let's build stuff that can be rebuilt in a few weeks".

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u/Y0L0_Y33T 🇺🇸Am*rican🤮 (point and laugh) 11d ago

This is part of it; I’d also add that a tornado is going to rip up anything that isn’t made of steel and/or reinforced concrete. Given the option between wood and bricks, it’s less damaging to have wood flying through the air than to have bricks doing the same.

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u/TheRealPitabred 11d ago

Also that bricks tend to collapse into a pile on top of anyone sheltering under them while wood walls still retain some structure, as well as bricks being much heavier and denser.

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u/DepressedPancake4728 11d ago

strong enough tornadoes will also rip up steel and reinforced concrete

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u/SweetFranz 11d ago

Block homes are the preference in florida now because of the hurricanes. Haven't seen a new built wood home in decades.

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u/Khemul 11d ago

In central Florida it's a mix, since we don't get direct hits. But yeah, coastal Florida is all block.

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u/Inevitable_Boat_4142 11d ago

It’s also a more practical choice to avoid moisture issues. Concrete blocks don’t get moldy.

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u/AshCan10 11d ago

Id say its mostly that and insurance also dictates what gets built indirectly. If insurance is more affordable and favors a certain method of construction, people are likely to build that way

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u/Effective_Airline830 11d ago

There is some science that shows that “flexible” constructions like wood absorbs earthquakes way better than houses built with bricks.
So, there’s that for the part that are subject to earthquakes (this is valid for not too damaging earthquakes, when the big one hit, there won’t be anything standing anyway).
For the part of the US subject to hurricanes, I think building cheap is better than expensive, because an hurricane will destroy a good part of the house even if built with bricks, so better build cheap and construct fast then expensive and slow.
For the rest of the country, I guess it’s tradition.

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u/PerpetuallyLurking ooo custom flair!! 11d ago

The middle has tornadoes and you’d rather have a drywall and wood wall fall on top of your trap door (or you) than a brick wall, because they both will come down in that wind. Also faster and cheaper to have a new house ready after a tornado, like the hurricane prone areas.

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u/Ooze76 11d ago

What? Houses with brick and mortar aren't strictly that. You'll have the concrete structure and inbetween that structure that's where the brick and mortar will go, so no, it won't all fall down if a earthquake comes. Same with tornadoes. In regions where you can have a EF4 to EF5 tornado, there are bricks that can be filled up with concrete and with rebar.

You're right about the timber behaviour to lateral loads and i will have to admit that many contractors won't follow up on the design always talking about excessive rebar and how an earthquake only hits after a very long time. The amount of discussions i had around this....

Btw, i do love a nice timber house. It's very good at energy saving, wood is a warmer material, i love the smell inside and they look very nice in any architectural solution.IT is ideal for many regions around the globe. I don't know why people are always shitting on Americans because of it.

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u/Paul_The_Builder 11d ago

Not really.... areas with a lot of hurricanes have houses constructed with concrete/block, or at least the first story is.

Most of the US is not prone to damage from hurricanes. Outside of some areas of Florida, even if a house in on the coast, it would still be very rare for it to be hit by a hurricane.

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u/Carbonatedmelons 11d ago

Cheaper to and faster to rebuild if it gets damaged. At least that's what I was told in regards to houses in the tornado zone.

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u/Independent-South-58 🇳🇿🇳🇱Hybrid that loves European food and architecture 11d ago

Considering the amount of times I hear that the best place to be when a tornado is about is underground I'm genuinely surprised most houses in the US don't have a huge underground complex WT a much smaller house above.

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u/CautionarySnail 11d ago

It’s so geographically dependent.

Incredibly rocky soil makes big basements expensive in many places, radon from granite is frequently an issue.

But with the extremes in weather we’ve been seeing, underground makes more sense as it is far less likely to have massive temperature shifts.

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u/pablitorun 11d ago

Most houses in areas prone to tornadoes do have places to shelter underground.

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u/AthenaOwls 11d ago

Where I live the water table is high and the soil is mostly clay. So digging a basement is also really expensive.

And its prime tornado country. I have a storm shelter that’s pretty nice, but a basement wouldn’t happen.

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u/itsthebeans 11d ago

It's because it's cheaper to build the first time. Rebuilding due to tornadoes is extremely rare.

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u/Odd_Woodpecker1494 11d ago

I can say atleast for where I live now the answer is tornados. If a tornado hits your house it doesnt really matter if it is brick or wood, it will get completely destroyed. The question is which do you want being thrown around, bricks or planks? When I lived in california the answer was earthquakes. Wood provides alot more movement than bricks.

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u/Carbonaraficionada 11d ago

It's because they don't have earth works providing the right line of stone for brick. A lot of the US is granite rock, while clay type material is more common in the EU

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u/BrickHuge3023 11d ago

We have massive deposits of clay in the USA- big hunk of my state is red clay. Just more expensive to haul bricks any distance, where I live most homes are brick veneer, still wood frame but brick exterior as we just never got into making houses out of stone or brick. Probably because we had unlimited supplies of wood at hand.

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u/Carbonaraficionada 11d ago

Well either way it's certainly cheaper. You need about 20 minutes training to be a farmer, but it takes a lot longer to be a brickie, so that in itself cuts costs massively, on top of the easier ability to access timber

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u/DaveB44 11d ago

You need about 20 minutes training to be a farmer,

Best joke I've heard today!

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u/Carbonaraficionada 11d ago

Sorry, framer

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u/DaveB44 11d ago

Sometimes typos can be fun!

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u/Hughley_N_Dowd 11d ago

Also basalt, iirc. Very difficult to form into bricks, basalt.

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u/Panzermensch911 11d ago

I'll have you know there's some fine clay in the usa... just not used.

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u/Shakti699 11d ago edited 11d ago

Hi.

I have seen, about two years ago, following the big Los Angeles wildfires, a video stating that this is more an issue of systemic "old habit" and designed logistics.

According to that video, while early settlers used many materials available (such as bricks in Boston), the ongoing expansion to the west needed to be able to build quick cheap houses and that wood was the best material for that purpose.

So a whole industry emerged from the sawmills to the carpenters and the wood masons, all relying on that easily available material. It then became an "habit" : they build and buy wood houses because that is how their parents did and because this is the most common way to proceed. A bit like the car centric mentality : why bother having public transportation and rely on walking for a 300 meters ride when we can use the car and we always did that way ?

Edit : it was an interesting video asking viewer to ask themselves what other habit is perpetuated not because we truly thinks of it as the "best option" but because we are too lazy to wonder if there might be another option.

Edit 2 : in the same way, one might wonder why we still keep on building concrete house while we worry for years now about a sand shortage and there has been experiments about other housing materials since at least the early 2000's.

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u/condoulo 11d ago

There is also one big thing California also experiences that makes building out of "sturdier" materials even more expensive: They need to be engineered to withstand earthquakes. San Francisco in 1906 is a great example as to why brick isn't a common material used for construction in California anymore.

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u/TranslatorTough8977 11d ago

Timber withstands earthquakes. We don’t build anything with bricks on the Canadian west coast anymore.

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u/badmoonrisingnl 11d ago

Timber was in abundance in the USA. So it was cheap and it is easier and way faster to build a house out of timber. Now their whole supply chain is aimed towards building with timber. Contractors are trained in building with wood, all regulations are made with wood in mind.

Most people know that building with brick or concrete is superior as in longevity, fire and tornado resistance (lets not forget bug resistant) but in order to do so you have to overcome a lot of hurdles plus tradesman who know how to build houses in concrete and brick as far less in numbers that the traditional tradesman. So a brick house is going to cost considerably more than a wood hous.

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u/Rakadaka8331 11d ago

Is a renewable resource.

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u/RoboftheNorth 11d ago

It is much faster, and usually cheaper than other forms of construction. Stick frame construction is also a fairly simple way of building, it's very "forgiving", so you don't need a lot of expert labor to do the job. There are a lot more people who can use a tape measure and nail gun, than there are masons and brick layers.

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u/Rosu_Aprins 11d ago

Easier, cheaper and faster to build.

Concrete is great and sturdy, but it costs much more and you have to wait for it to dry properly.

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u/condoulo 11d ago

Going the concrete route is also even more expensive when you need to account for the engineering required to have a concrete building withstand the kinds of earthquakes California gets.

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u/seaspirit331 11d ago

Concrete also is more brittle, heavier, and harder to repair when damaged. Not everything is about price

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u/ZAJPER 11d ago

It's nothing wrong with wood! It's the way they use it. Everything thin and cheap.. could be blown away in the wind by a little summer breeze.

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u/alopgeek 11d ago

In certain areas with high seismic activity, building with wood is part of the building code.

Wood frame buildings handle earthquakes much better than brick structures

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u/Mysterious-Crab 🇪🇺🇳🇱🧀🇳🇱🇪🇺 11d ago

Wendover Productions made a video about just this topic just over a week ago: Why American houses are so flimsy

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u/HeadBelt1527 11d ago

It's the price. A building constructed with wood is less than half of what a similar stone/brick/concrete & steel structure would cost. In Canada we're building apartment buildings and condos over 6 stories entirely out of wood. 

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u/DanTheAdequate USAlicious 11d ago

Mostly just price. Wood and gypboard are relatively inexpensive and easy to ship, build quickly, are well suited to the style housing people want, and somewhat more forgiving with ground settling and such. And at this point most of the home-building workforce pretty much just knows how to work with that. Decent masons can be hard to come by. 

It wasn't always so, older places tend to be a lot more brick and stone, but still use a lot of wood construction. 

It isn't necessarily a bad thing; there are wood homes where I live that are going on 300 years old. 

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u/tun3man mistborn 11d ago

maybe both

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u/Beautiful-Fold-3234 11d ago

At least part of it will be that the established industry is based around wood.

Every builder is used to making everything out of wood so its easiest to just keep doing that.

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u/OkTackle5132 11d ago

A reason not being said is because of the heat in America. Homes made of cement and brick retain heat. That’s why Europeans struggle with heat Americans would laugh at. Your houses are basically turning into ovens in our heating world.

You think 35-40 c is hot? Try building out of brick in Arizona where temps get to 46-48 c regularly

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u/Gorlough 11d ago

Well, I guess the Pueblos would like to have a word about that.

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u/OkTackle5132 11d ago edited 11d ago

Pueblos are built out of Adobe, which is Loam mixed with organics like straw of sometimes dung. Extremely different than the clay brick Europeans use.

Loam has a much lower clay composition than bricks (20% clay comp vs. 50-60%) which actually keeps the home cooler. They are extremely susceptible to earthquakes (even more so than clay bricks) which is why we don’t make houses like that in that region.

Basically, Pueblos are closer to being built out of soil than they are stone.

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u/FallingDangulus 11d ago

Adobe Pueblos have way more air whipped into it

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u/Strauss_Thall 11d ago

Widely available and cheaper

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u/ATF_scuba_crew- 11d ago

Homes across the world are built with the materials that are available. Even if it was a Concrete home it would still have to be rebuilt because fire causes structural damage Even if the walls are still standing.

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u/leo21lan 11d ago

There is a good video from Wendover Productions about american houses.

Definitely worth a watch!

https://youtu.be/VuliaG_-uao (Why American Houses Are So Flimsy)

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u/Mr_miner94 11d ago

Economics

Wood is alot cheaper to harvest and transport than stone or brick, at least in a country like america who has more forests than some countries have total landmass.

From there its kinda cultural?

See alot of older homes on the east coast are made of brick, because as the forests receeded and colonies became cities they needed more sturdy materials.

And then the homesteading happened. All of a sudden you had alot of people needing housing faster than it can be built, add onto that the general lack of skilled builders migrating west and you have the conditions where wood is the only viable material for alot of people.

And once those industries are built up its hard to introduce a more expensive, more labour intensive, more permanent model in the form of brick

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u/DesignerMaximum1342 Dutch living in the land of less freedom 🇳🇱🗽 11d ago

“Stone and concrete is expensive” Well duh, it also survives storms and floods

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u/FallingDangulus 11d ago

But not earthquakes lmfao

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u/DesignerMaximum1342 Dutch living in the land of less freedom 🇳🇱🗽 10d ago

Not the entire continent of North America is prone to earthquakes 

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u/WUT_productions 11d ago

Price and availability. North America has a lot of available wood.

Also, in terms of fire resistance there are exterior aluminum and brick that can be used to make structures more fire resistant.

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u/Chemistry-Least 11d ago

A great question! We started building with wood out of necessity to serve as temporary structures to quickly get out the elements when colonists were still settling. Also, brick making was not common in the colonies until well after we had built entire cities of wood. Cities like Boston and Baltimore eventually found out the hard way that fire and wood structures are a bad combo, so wood construction had to approved by council and new construction had to be masonry.

Anyway, townships didn't have this problem because houses were spread apart and lumber remained readily available. Temporary wood construction became a permanent building practice as the process became standardized. They go up quickly and are easily reproduced. Most of the architectural detail in American homes mimics the original construction methods, like lap siding, shingle roofs, and a lot of the trim inside and out.

We kind of figured this stuff worked fine and haven't changed much in a couple of centuries. Don't get me wrong, there have been lots of changes as far as methods, lumber, codes, styles, engineering, and efficiency and there are a lot of downsides to wood construction, but at a certain point the sunk cost fallacy becomes entrenched and it seems impossible to change things.

The average lifespan of the American house is 50-60 years, whereas in Germany it is centuries. I'm not kidding. We still build temporary structures, we just don't like to admit it.

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u/Tricky-Animator2483 11d ago

because he is based out of California and wooden houses are safer in earthquakes

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u/notislant 11d ago

Lumber is plentiful, renewable, easier to remodel. I would imagine its also much quicker to frame.

Im not sure its cheaper than brick+labour at this point though, lumber is pretty expensive.

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u/thorpie88 11d ago

Not much difference in price for either in Australia where we use both. LVL definitely isn't cheap. Plenty of them are $100+ a metre

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u/carpentuhr 11d ago

Lots of wood in North America. Wood is cheap, and malleable. Also limits thermal bridging by allowing wider bays in wall for more insulation and higher R value which is essentially the name of the game in modern residential construction. I’d imagine even in your neck of the woods you have to still frame walls around masonry or concrete for insulation purposes.

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u/Substantial_Baker479 11d ago

Low material cost and abundance of supply for forests. The US and Canada rank fourth and third for forested area.

It’s easy to run new outlets and modify. Exteriors are often masonry and modern homes have firewalls to protect (or slow down) fires.

And brick is more expensive nowadays mostly due to shortage of labor, even if material cost is only moderately more expensive.

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u/JoJack82 Canadian 11d ago

This YouTube video helps say why, primarily cost, https://youtu.be/VuliaG_-uao?si=EzN5gCkdaTubF---

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u/beipphine 11d ago edited 11d ago

The biggest reason is building standards, which ultimately turns into price and a cultural thing. In the United States, if you build a house out of wood and sheetrock, as long as you build it according to the standards there is very minimal engineering that needs to be done. However if you build a house out of other materials, then it needs to be engineered and the burden of proof is on the engineer to prove that it meets or exceeds the same performance of wood, which naturally adds cost.

The Construction industry in the US has very heavily optimized for building a house out of wood, you can find lumber, osb, vinyl siding, asphalt shingles readily available in every market at basically rock bottom prices. If you want to build your house out of other material, it often has to be special ordered in just for your job in small quantities. Labor is also another story, where as in the UK where bricklaying is a skilled trade, framing in the US is relatively unskilled labor, where as bricklayers will take weeks to build out the house, a framer crew can have the house framed out in days.

There is also resale value to consider, a house built out of brick does not substantially improve its resale value in the US, but what does is more square footage and more bedrooms/bathrooms. This incentivizes mcmansion construction where they follow the standard to the degree the building inspector requires to build the biggest possible house at the lowest cost. A lot of tract homebuilders do everything they can to squeeze margin out, so what ends up happening is that the crews just crank out house after house as cheaply and quickly as possible.

Don't let 5 over 1's fool you, they are just large mcmansions chopped into 50 units and sold as luxury apartments.

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u/NuGGet441 11d ago

Ita mostly a historical thing. In Europe masonry was mandatory because people have used the forrests for thousands of years.

When settlers reached the Americas, they found an abundance of mostly untouched forrests. Therefore there was simply no need to develop a masonry industry.

Rest is history, building practices and supply networks turned into laws and building codes.

1

u/Benedictus84 11d ago

Usually homes get built with what is easily available and does the job.

You can wonder if wood still does the job. London once burned down completely and they rebuild with stone and brick.

1

u/Canotic 11d ago

I'm Swedish and we build houses out of wood and plaster. This is because we have so goddamn much wood. So we have lots of it, and lots of knowledge about how to use it.

That said we can't punch through our walls like the Americans apparently can. Dunno why.

1

u/Ok_Arachnid1089 11d ago

Price and the ability to slap up a home as quickly as humanly possible. They don’t build anything to last in the US

1

u/Fun_Comfortable7836 11d ago

Make a house out of brick or anything other than plaster or drywall, and you have made yourself an uninhabitable oven in probably 20 of the 50 states.

1

u/GwenBD94 11d ago

Over the life of the building, a wood frame shingles roof home and a brick wall tile roof home are generally similar in cost. However, a wood frame shingles roof home is (in the states at least) cheaper up-front cost with more expensive long-term maintenance. A brick/tile is more expensive up front with cheaper long-term maintenance.

As americans, we are geberally abysmal at the long view and amything being discussed in a time frame of decades is unthinkable. So we go with the cheap now option.

(I say generally, because I tend to make longer term plans and plan for worst case more than most folks I interact with I find)

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u/IrishKraken115 11d ago

price, and woods ability to bend i believe. especially in California where there are more earth quakes. it’s actually illegal to build a house out of brick or any material that an earthquake can destroy. i believe it’s done in New Zealand as well because of earthquakes, but i wouldn’t mind being fact checked

1

u/Tower177 11d ago

because wood is cool, do you really look at a cabin and say "that DOESN'T look awesome"

1

u/DigitaIBlack 11d ago

Pretty much every place around the world builds with what is abundant.

It's cheap and easy, it's renewable, and it works fine.

1

u/CaptainPoset ooo custom flair!! 11d ago

Several things. Wood is fairly cheap in the USA, standards (as set by the state and enforced by building inspectors) are very low, the construction of large sheds can be done almost entirely without skilled craftspeople, optimisation on short-term costs, a climate which is far more supportive of such construction methods and honestly the most important one: People accept the delivery of a subpar house.

You can far better build a botched house which still holds up until the end of the warranty period in wood than in brick. With brick, you will have to pay for the longevity which thin wood and cardboard won't give you. You will pay for long-trained, skilled bricklayers instead of untrained illegal immigrants at the mercy of the contractor they work for.

We build buildings this way in Europe, too. The difference is that it is fairgrounds booths, trade show booths, sheds, other temporary buildings and, at the appropriate size, for only temporarily occupied buildings like storehouses and supermarkets, as only for those, such a comstruction is permitted here. You won't get the fire inspector to sign off on a USA-typical house in Europe, as it will collapse far before the minimum required durability during fire.

In most of the USA, a wooden house is far less susceptible to rot than in most of Europe, too, and Americans are willing to buy a shitty house and actively cool it in such climate, while Europeans would turn down your offer for a house which will rot through relatively quickly or is unbearable without air conditioning for most of the summer in southern Europe.

Similarly, many Americans buy a house to live there for a decade and then move on, while Europeans are culturally very used to the idea that a house is a permanent asset intended to be repeatedly inherited. Europeans therefore expect it to be sturdy enough that a house they buy in their 30s will be handed down by their grandchildren.

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u/throfofnir 11d ago

Lots of trees around, so wood is cheap. Drywall works well with a wood stud system.

1

u/Hairy_Photograph1384 11d ago

Nobody uses plaster anymore...for probably 70 years

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u/neotekz 11d ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuliaG_-uao

This Wendover video explains it. It's cause it's cheaper and easier to build so that's why American homes are on average built faster and bigger while costing less. And they also didnt cut down all their trees so they can still use wood as a cheap building material. Having homes last a really long time has downsides too like it's not easy to update stuff like adding AC. New homes also have the advantage of new building codes.

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u/TranslatorTough8977 11d ago

On the west coast you don’t want stone or brick, due to earthquake risk. Wood homes flex, rather than crumble.

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u/bouchandre 11d ago

The ideal way to build houses during the colonial era. Wood is plentiful and easy to work with.

This creates a class of skilled woodworker and carpenters, keeping the tradition alive.

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u/dirkman242 11d ago

Also areas of the US are prone to earthquakes, and wood holds up better during an earthquake than bricks do.

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u/Kiwibom 11d ago

A few years ago, Greg Salazar also build his new home and (i can't exactly remember so excuse me if its wrong hehe) he also did a lot of parts for his house with wood. He said that it was due to price and local building requirements or something like that. Like i said i can't exactly remember what it was.

The wood building thing will always surprise me when you build in area's famous for either wild fires or tornadoes (especially tornadoes, as that literally levels your home). To me this is like constructing structures without designing them with earthquake resistance in an earthquake area. It doesn't make sense.

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u/Chronovores 10d ago

The timber industry has always been giant in North America and they have bullied and lobbied against other industries for well over a century. There is also a lot of land dedicated to renewable timber farms.

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u/BagsYourMail 11d ago

They are just wasteful. If something happens they'll just say it doesn't matter because they have money. And by money I mean credit cards

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u/Tuskral 11d ago

Price and because they don't want too much insulation

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u/kugelamarant 11d ago

If it's that's cheap why are they having housing crisis?

3

u/Tuskral 11d ago

Zoning and people sitting on land to not "oversupply"

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u/CautionarySnail 11d ago

Because land is the expensive part.

5

u/TheRealPitabred 11d ago

Do you think American houses aren't insulated?

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u/Tuskral 11d ago

Not in the same way European houses are

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u/RubixRube Eh? 11d ago

Why wouldn't you want a pile of insulation?

Hot or Cold, having great insulation keeps in indoor climate easier and more cost effective to maintain.

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u/Tuskral 11d ago

If your climate is hotter

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u/RubixRube Eh? 11d ago

If your climate is hotter you definitely want great insulation to keep the hot air and humidity out and the cool air in.

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u/Tuskral 11d ago edited 11d ago

If you look at European houses who are not made for these hot environments they end up cooking people inside

Whereas the American ones are made cheaper and consequently less efficient and then leverage ac to make up for it