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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

Why don't homebuilders in the US use brick and stone? Plywood and screws still seems like cutting corners.

It's been a very long time since brick or stone were commonly used as structural elements in US houses. For decades, houses have typically been stick-frame, perhaps with brick or stone used for the facade. In such cases, the brick or stone is serving merely as cladding for the house just as siding would. Brick or stone facades are typically more expensive than wood or fiber cement sidings but the choice of the former rather than the latter is based on aesthetics, not intrinsic quality. There are definitely high-quality and attractive houses that have no brick or stone. For example, this older house was re-clad with fiber cement siding and it's appropriate for the character of the house:

http://www.fibercement-siding.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09...

It's a lot more costly. Look at the market labor rates and availability in any major metro area for masons.

How come they afford it in Europe then? All four walls in every room in my house here are a foot of solid brick, and it's not an abnormally expensive house.

Any idea of the cost per sqft (or square meter) to build your block house? I build wood-frame homes in the US for ~ $95/sqft. These are nice homes with decent finishes, proper insulation, etc but we benefit from low labor costs in my area.

No I've no idea and maybe it's much more expensive.

But they're not blocks by the way if you're thinking of large cement or cinder blocks - all the houses round here are made structurally from proper red bricks.

My wood framed house in New Zealand cost $200/sqft and we’re not talking high end. Blame our cost of shipping, labour and local building supplies monopoly.

Because there is a local abundance of materials and skilled laborers.

In the US you’d have trouble sourcing bricks and even more trouble hiring brick layers.

If you visit the north east the oldest building (upto 400 odd years old) are stick+frame because thats what they had available when they got off the boat, the workforce and techniques grew from there.

E.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairbanks_House_(Dedham,_Mas...

Edit: corrected 450 -> 400

I think it's more obvious if you've ever lived in or near the parts of the Pacific Northwest that produce a lot of the US and Canada's lumber supply for stick built houses. BC, WA, OR, ID. I personally know very little about the economics of bricks, but you can sit by the BNSF railway which runs from Seattle-Vancouver and watch entire southbound massive trainloads of BC lumber wrapped up in plastic, rolling south towards distribution and end users.

looks like this: http://vanderheide.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/IMG_62...

I think it may be more of a cultural thing. Here in Brazil, even the poor illegal unpainted houses in the infamous favelas use brick.

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