North America has more tornadoes than anywhere else on earth, by a lot. Tornadoes do not give a fuck what you made your house out of, they will pick it up and throw it at you. And if you’re gonna have to dig yourself out from under what used to be your house, you’d rather it be pretty light.

A good chunk of the area where tornadoes don’t happen, the west coast, earthquakes happen regularly and again, you do not want to build houses out of hard materials, you want buildings that can shake and sway and not fall down.

Cost is certainly a factor too, historically the US has had more access to cheap lumber than Europe has because the Roman’s didn’t chop down all our trees 2000 years ago.

Taking all that into account wood frame construction totally makes sense here, but does have the problem of making things more flammable, and so we have to take other precautions for that. Looking up some stats right now, the US does have more building fires than most other countries, but how likely you are to die in one of those fires is far lower, and it evens out to the US being right in the middle as far as fire deaths go.

[–] Horse@lemmygrad.ml 11 points 3 days ago (2 children)

A good chunk of the area where tornadoes don’t happen, the west coast, earthquakes happen regularly and again, you do not want to build houses out of hard materials, you want buildings that can shake and sway and not fall down.

just to gently push back on this, most other places with more earthquakes do make their buildings out of concrete and brick

[–] thethirdgracchi@hexbear.net 11 points 3 days ago

Yeah even Japan, a place with a ton of earthquakes and traditional wood construction, at this point mostly uses reenforced concrete for their buildings. And they perform well, as shown by the 2011 earthquake, a magnitude 9.1 quake that was one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded. The overwhelming majority of the destruction was caused by the tsunami, not the quake, and these reenforced concrete structures performed well even with an earthquake of that magnitude.

[–] ClimateStalin@hexbear.net 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I stand gently corrected. I do believe my point still stands for the tornadoes part though, which is a problem basically everywhere east of the Rocky Mountains aside from Maine

Also it is cheaper, and since we have figured out how to manage wooden buildings in a way that gives us a very average number of fire deaths, I see no reason to switch. It does mean we need to keep requirements like “two fire escape staircases” though.

[–] regul@hexbear.net 2 points 2 days ago

You'd have to control for fire deaths just in multi-unit buildings, though.