why are most suburban houses in the US built with wood, instead of bricks and mortar?
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Wood generally tends to be very [in]expensive and widely available while also being very strong.
As such, it’s an ideal material for low rise residential construction
Its quick to build with, if you want to make a bunch of houses quickly in a new neighborhood wood framed houses are the way to go.
Wood is cheap, plentiful, and easy to build with and transport. Very good strength/weight ratio compared to masonry.
A full masonry structure is enormously heavy and much more costly. Even most “brick” houses in the the US are “masonry facade” with a wooden frame.
You can get some cinderblock construction in hurricane bullseye zones along the gulf coast, other than that it’s almost entirely wood frame construction in the US.
Wood is much cheaper to build with in the US. It is possible for you to build two houses out of wood, for the price it would cost to make a single house out of bricks and mortar. As such, because in the overwhelming majority of cases wood is perfectly sufficient to make a house out of, it just makes sense economically.
While you may be seeing news reports about hurricanes and tornadoes destroying houses, those are powerful forces of nature that can also destroy houses made of bricks.
Availability of materials, ease of construction, and local climate.
Brick and mortar is much more expensive to produce and transport than wood. So in a comfortable climate with little to no reason for the greater protections of a stone dwelling it is difficult to convince a home buyer to spend a significant more on durable materials and construction when a wooden structure can be put up quickly and inexpensively.
Answer: because wood is widely available in the US, and is strong for its weight. If a storm is strong enough to destroy a wooden-frame house, a stone/brick house won’t fare much better
Counterpoint: why does it matter? Europeans seem *oddly* obsessed with what Americans build their houses out of.
Cost. Wood is a LOT cheaper than B&M. In climates where you don’t need brick for the properties it provides, why not use the cheaper alternative?
If you’re on the west coast, earthquakes are the answer. Bricks don’t hold up well in earthquakes.
Well, most bricks. A guy named Moles had an earthquake brick that was going to revolutionize San Francisco housing but he over-voltaged his computer and destroyed it.
One historical reason for wood to be the preferred material was the availability of skills around 150-200 years ago. Stonemasons and bricklayers were not common. Wood construction was more amenable to mass construction. That just stuck and we continue to build houses mostly from wood.
Adding in here that wood construction is surprisingly mostly carbon neutral and holds that carbon for many decades in most cases. A single small plot of land can theoretically produce wood forever at near zero cost. Concrete is not great for the environment and there is a ton of CO2 and other gases involved in the production.
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