The US makes homes with wood while the rest of the world uses cement blocks. Are there any added benefits over either?
In: Engineering
Cost. Wood framed homes in the USA are significantly less expensive than brick/cinderblock/concrete homes. This is because wood is both cheaper, you need less of it when framing walls, and it is lightly and easier to assemble/put up. Building a brick wall costs more in materials, costs more in labor time to build, and the materials themselves are heavier so the labor is more strenuous.
The reason Europe doesn’t have wood houses really is because Europe lost its timber industry LONG ago. There aren’t really any major logging operations going on on the continent because there aren’t any wild forests left to log. They’ve all been inhabited and populated by humans for hundreds of years. So people had to turn to brick and stone because that is the material they had access to.
But the USA has PLNETY of timber. There are a lot of abundant cheap forests to log. And really the US timber industry has gotten so good at replanting areas that it’s damn near self sufficient at this point. There are more trees in the USA Today than there were 50 years ago.
So it’s just a matter of cost and availability of materials
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