why are most suburban houses in the US built with wood, instead of bricks and mortar?
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You’re actually hiding a couple of questions in here. The US specifically tends towards wood framed houses, while much of Europe tends towards masonry houses, with brick in particular more well represented than US practice. But there are also steel framed houses and concrete masonry houses.
* Why does the US do framed houses instead of masonry houses?
Frame building is faster and cheaper than masonry. It doesn’t have the extreme longevity that masonry can at the high end, but it’s easily past the expected useful life of the home. It’s also somewhat easier to gut and renovate, which also plays into the US housing market.
* When the US does build masonry houses in modern suburbia, why do they use concrete instead of brick?
Where the US does build masonry houses, it tends to do so via concrete blocks or ICF. There is a reason for that. The areas where this kind of building happens in the US tend to be places that deal with significant risk of hurricanes and tornadoes. While it is possible build equivalent resilience for those risks into modern brick masonry, it is significantly more expensive than equivalent concrete masonry structures.
Much of Europe uses concrete like this as well, though brick is better represented than in the US.
* Why does the US build frame houses with wood instead of steel framing?
Wood is relatively cheaper in the US market than elsewhere, and good enough for most single family residential purposes. That, combined with a lack of regulatory incentive, has meant a limited incentive for steel framing to supplant wood (as it has done, for example, in China). Steel framing also imposes certain architectural constraints on the house layout that run counter to US suburban sprawl: to oversimplify significantly, it incentivizes building up, not out. I don’t personally think that’s a bad thing, but high-end suburban housing in the US almost always elects for a larger footprint over adding a more than 2 floors.
Edit: I had conflated brick being more common in Europe than the US with brick being the most common in Europe. That is not correct. Clarified. Thanks u/Hamsparrow
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