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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

What I always wonder why Americans don't build solid houses? In Russia and in Kazakhstan everyone builds house with thick (70-150 cm) walls with bricks and with good foundation. Even poor people don't build houses from plywood. But in America it seems that everyone, poor and rich builds extremely fragile houses. Like I can punch a wall with my knuckle. It seems so absurd. Especially with those prices that I'm hearing about, like house costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, up to a millions of dollars. I can build awesome house here for like $200k with very quality materials. Can American build a good house from bricks with very thick walls for a reasonable amount of money?

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Two reasons - at least on the West coast, building codes incorporate earthquake survivability of the occupants, inexpensive solid walls collapse easily in earthquakes, 2. speed and cost of construction and availability of labor for woodframe housing and even multistory apartment buildings across the USA.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-13/why-ameri...

We build our houses so that if they collapse on you, you can just dust yourself off and walk away. :-)

All over the world houses are built according to available local materials and the degree of weather insulation required, mainly.

In America, houses in Maine can be built completely differently from houses in Florida.

The reason we don't build out of stone/brick, besides cost of construction, is that they're terrible insulators. So your heating or AC bill is going to go absolutely through the roof.

A wood frame stuffed with insulation means your home can be energy-efficient. This is a good thing.

We don't fetishize a house being "solid" and we don't generally punch our walls on a regular basis. :) "Solid" sounds like a big waste of money to me.

The thing is, the USA is the country with most tornadoes in the world. A solid house with thick walls is tornado-resistant. Yet, you lose thousands of plywood homes per year due to tornadoes, while the rest of the world builds real houses with stone walls just because they are more beautiful. What it seems to me is that you have a weird, unhealthy fetish for paper-thin houses.

There are vast areas of the US that are not generally affected by tornados. It’s a big country.

> The thing is, the USA is the country with most tornadoes in the world. A solid house with thick walls is tornado-resistant. Yet, you lose thousands of plywood homes per year due to tornadoes, while the rest of the world builds real houses with stone walls just because they are more beautiful. What it seems to me is that you have a weird, unhealthy fetish for paper-thin houses.

It seems this fetish is spreading. My family is from a fairly small island in the Mediterranean where all the houses are constructed of solid reinforced concrete and foreigners who are buying property for vacation homes have been putting up little timber boxes which are the subject of local gossip.

tornadoes effect a minority of people in the US. population dense centers like california are more likely to succumb to earthquakes, in which case your concrete home is way worse

physics basically--same reason why wings aren't built with high rigidity (or with bricks).

brick walls have good downward (and in-line lateral) force resistance and suck at every other direction and torsion. tornado forces are multi-directional. wood frame walls are strapped down to the foundation in earthquake/tornado zones. plywood acts against (some) lateral and torsional forces.

plus, flying bricks are more dangerous to squishy humans.

Do you often have flying skyscrapers? Or pieces of concrete during tornadoes? Or even just rocks from mountains? The concrete technology is supposed to be able to achieve similar results. Does it take too much expensive concrete? What numerical comparisons are saying?

Even if you do live in "Tornado Alley" tornadoes can have a surprisingly limited effect - small tornadoes have the habit of carving small paths in the city, capable of leaving one side of a road pristine and the other destroyed.

In either case, building a home out of stone would do very little to stop, say, a refrigerator picked up by the tornado moving at 200 mph. Nor will it stop the house from pressurizing and blowing the roof off, stone or no stone. I mean, it could, if the walls were a foot thick each and there were no windows.

As a result, most Americans in the Tornado Alley (who can afford it) have a basement that has stone walls, and just accept the small probability that they lose almost all of their home.

Relative to land area, the UK has more tornadoes than the USA (and anywhere else in the world): https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/climate-information/extreme-events...

As the article notes, the UK's tornadoes are generally weak. It's national news if a single house loses a roof. We don't get massive twisters marching through towns cutting a swathe of destruction.

> The reason we don't build out of stone/brick, besides cost of construction, is that they're terrible insulators. So your heating or AC bill is going to go absolutely through the roof.

The very opposite. A thin layer of plywood is a terrible insulator. Bricks are very good.

Bricks are actually very poor insulators.

A wood-frame house with the framing elements filled with appropriate thicknesses of insulation is a very, very much better insulated structure than one made (only) of brick.

I mentioned in another comment, nobody's building houses out of sheets of plywood. (I mean plywood may or may not be involved, but that's not the "wood" part of a "wooden house".)

Wooden houses have wooden frames, with the wooden beams spread out, so that the space between them is chock-full of insulation.

This insulation is far, far, far superior than brick/stone can ever be. Brick is a terrible insulator. That's just a fact.

The point in brick/concrete walls is that they are much sturdier and harder to break - voluntarily or involuntarily - than plywood. It sounds like proponents of wooden structures keep forgetting that.

For thermal protection you can add the same insulation as for the wooden frame.

How those stone houses in New England fare during the year, are they that obsolete in terms of insulation?

I can tell you how the stone houses in Quebec fare - they're shit. It's drafty and awful and you have to continually run the heater. Compared to my modern insulated condo with drywall walls and joist-and-beam construction (with a concrete support beam and an entire wall of windows), where I run the heater for maybe 20 minutes a day? It's a difference.

The stone houses are cold in the Northeast, and the brick or stone ones fall down in earthquakes in the West.

"Solid" sounds like a big waste of money to me.

It's my experience that our American housing/apartment market is obsessed with pictures and numbers. Square footage. Dazzling photos. Checklists of amenities.

And this has been the source of much misery for me. For years I have hunted for somewhere to live with even a modicum of soundproofing. I've tried older duplex buildings with deep basements that are now illegal for fire escape reasons, higher end apartments, standalone houses, ...

Nobody advertises based on "soundproofing", with one exception that was ultimately a lie. Nobody advertises based on air system quality.

It's like we have completely forgotten that we have any senses other than sight.

I'm sorry but this insulation talk is complete nonsense. Here (Belgium) houses are mostly made of concrete blocks with an insulation filling, then fronted with bricks. No reason why you'd need to use wood to add an insulation layer.

Then why is wood more isolating than stone? Have you ever visited a medieval castle in the heat of summer? I guarantee that the thick stone walls offer more insulation than any modern home I've ever visited. Of course, we don't make walls that thick, but the material is not at issue.

(Background: I live in adobe home, with 24"/ 61cm thick adobe walls in much of the structure).

Brick/stone/adobe are not insulators. They have substantial thermal mass, which means that they act to stabilize temperature. Put differently, they create a phase delay between exterior and interior temperatures changes.

The problem with this model is that it works in both ways if you live in a climate (like much of the USA) with substantial swings in typical daily temperatures between seasons.

The same massively thick stone wall that keeps the medieval castle cool in the heat of summer is also chilled to well below freezing by the deep cold of winter, and turns the castle (or whatever) into an icebox.

This is why sensible construction involves both thermal mass (stone/brick/adobe) and insulation. The former helps stabilize temperature, the latter prevents substantial gradients between the structure and the interior (or exterior) from causing major energy flow.

Concrete is not very green or cheap. Stone quarries and transportation for modern suburbia would be very ungreen and expensive.

Aerated concrete for walls is a very awesome idea from Europe, but it’s not structural and by the time you build the structure for a typical two storey I’d bet that stick framing would be cheaper.

Euros typically put a much higher ratio of their income into housing and are willing to spend more. Same for Japan, and they build very good houses, but then tear them down after a couple of generations.

You don't seem to understand how insulation works (or is necessary) in the US.

It's not that wood is super-insulating (though it's certainly better than stone). It's that wooden beams are spread far apart, and the space between them can be chock-full of insulation.

And as another commenter pointed out, the main reason isn't summertime insulation -- it's wintertime insulation. Stone is freezing. When it's -20°C out, insulation in between wooden beams makes all the difference.

Concrete blocks filled with insulation still just have way too much concrete to transmit the cold directly from outside to inside.

>The reason we don't build out of stone/brick, besides cost of construction, is that they're terrible insulators. So your heating or AC bill is going to go absolutely through the roof.

I'm writing this from a perfectly insulated 200 years old stone house. We've got access to a wide array of insulation technology in Europe, often in the form of panels that can be used to renovate an older building. And you can just blast insulation on the bottom part of a roof, which costs a penny and takes care of a most of your thermal dissipation. Plus insulation is getting subsidized when the government wants to save energy.

>"Solid" sounds like a big waste of money to me.

Paying for a paper house sounds like a scam to me.

Instead of thinking in hyperbole, think in CS terms:

"Solid" houses are "immutable", and "paper" houses are "mutable".

I recently redid some plumbing in my "paper" house. It was real easy: shut off the water, cut some dry wall, make the fix, put some drywall back in, plaster, and paint.

How would this work in a solid house? Do I need to jackhammer through stone and then mix concrete to seal it back up when I'm done?

Yep. It's a ton of dirt

Pipes tend to be exposed in brick houses so you don’t need to tear the wall down when you have a leak.

You don't. You really don't need that for years and years in a row. When you need, you do need some tools though.

I see we can have all kinds of analogies; I guess habits play a big role here. Different places in USA have different house styles - it's a big country.

>How would this work in a solid house?

I've got copper tubing running along the bottom of the walls and going through inner walls and flooring. I can't think of anything going through the outer walls. We've got an antenna cable routed through a window frame.

I seriously don't understand this seeming cultural hate for wooden houses. Where is it coming from? Because it's just not based in any kind of reality.

Look, you're emotionally attached to the kind of house construction you grew up in as a kid. I can get that.

But do you realize how freezing it gets in the northeast USA here? When it's -10°C or -20°C, I don't care how insulated your roof is, your walls matter a ton. Stone makes zero sense.

And even suppose you wanted a house made out of stone. It would just so much more expensive to build it's crazy. People don't have the money for it.

There's zero "scam" here. Our houses are not "paper". You do realize we're not building houses out of plywood sheets, right? That we use strong wooden beams that can be covered in whatever siding material you want?

And that wooden houses aren't a "new cheap" thing -- I had friends in high school who lived in 150-year-old wooden houses. They're wonderful and charming, full of history.

Seriously. I do not understand this prejudice at all. Where does it come from?

Like, do you see news photos of destruction of trailer parks in hurricanes and blindly assume that's what happens to our houses (totally different thing) with a slight gust of wind? Because that's seriously the only thing I can guess here.

>I seriously don't understand this seeming cultural hate for wooden houses.

Well, we do come from societies where having a house made of stone meant it wouldn't entirely burn in the next war.

>Look, you're emotionally attached to the kind of house construction you grew up in as a kid. I can get that.

This isn't some misplaced nostalgia for archaic traditions. It's how everybody lives on my fucking continent.

>But do you realize how freezing it gets in the northeast USA here? When it's -10°C or -20°C, I don't care how insulated your roof is, your walls matter a ton. Stone makes zero sense.

I honestly couldn't tell how right or wrong you are. On one hand the countries I know that reach those temperatures do like wooden houses, on the other hand they have an overabundance of timber. In any case it's entirely irrelevant to the weather in most of the US, where they still build like that.

>And even suppose you wanted a house made out of stone. It would just so much more expensive to build it's crazy. People don't have the money for it.

Our cheap default building material is concrete blocks. But stone is still an option.

>And that wooden houses aren't a "new cheap" thing -- I had friends in high school who lived in 150-year-old wooden houses. They're wonderful and charming, full of history.

I have a 700 year old house round the corner. I don't know of any wooden building in the area older than the late 1600s. It's just not made to last.

>Where does it come from?

France.

>Like, do you see news photos of destruction of trailer parks in hurricanes and blindly assume that's what happens to our houses (totally different thing) with a slight gust of wind? Because that's seriously the only thing I can guess here.

Well, everybody's seen those images of houses torn by tornadoes, or rotting from flooding, or burned to a crisp, or just crumbling after a few decades of neglect.

I'm looking into buying at the moment, and I've got my eyes on a few houses. All traditional houses made out of thick granite as we do here. The idea that someone would take on a debt that possibly spans decades over something that's not literally rock-solid is mind-boggling to me.

So, yeah, it might be entirely cultural. But that's still one thing on which I'll never give an inch.

> It's how everybody lives on my fucking continent.

Great. That was my original point. That housing construction depends on local considerations.

So why don't you stop judging the housing where I live? You've insultingly called our houses "paper" and a "scam". And now you're swearing.

I'm not judging housing in your country, but you're judging mine. I'm not asking you to "give an inch" on where you want to live, but you're the one saying Americans are making bad decisions in how they build.

Why don't you show a little empathy and stop?

Seriously, why all this judgment?

>on the other hand they have an overabundance of timber.

Oh hey, like America.

> Can American build a good house from bricks with very thick walls for a reasonable amount of money?

Not really, no. You can build a much bigger house and/or save money for upgrades to things that are expected to increase the later sale value of the house (chiefly, the kitchen, but also things like nice outdoor spaces) instead of building with brick. In some areas brick houses are more common but they are mostly older ones. It’s difficult to recover the extra cost of building with brick when selling a house, so it’s rarely done. Since most houses are build by housing developers contracted to one or more newly-building neighborhoods, they’re very sensitive to anything that would reduce their margins or see finished houses sit on their books, and all-brick construction would usually do that.

Brick is sometimes used in pasted-on façades, usually as a kind of “skirt” on the lower part of the front of the house. These may not even be full bricks, but ones cut lengthwise to maximize use of material and reduce weight (see: “pasted-on”)

[EDIT] I should add that the overriding concern of almost all home construction and renovation in the US is reducing the amount of labor required. That’s where most of the cost is, so it’s ruthlessly optimized.

Building with insulated concrete forms costs about 5% more.. So it is really not unaffordable to build a durable house in the US.

Everything is done to minimum standards in the US because of paradoxical markets like banks competing to give mortgages. The bank that wants only houses that will survive the mortgage let alone second buyers mortgage (for the threat to resale value) loses.

> That’s where most of the cost is, so it’s ruthlessly optimized.

What about all these illegal immigrants I keep hearing about in the news? Shouldn't they depress the cost of manual labor?

That is already factored into the comment you're replying to.

I think the concept that timber houses are inherently fragile is not really true.

> Even poor people don't build houses from plywood. But in America it seems that everyone, poor and rich builds extremely fragile houses.

It isn't generally just plywood, that would be a very unusual house.

As for your question of cost, with brick exterior walls, the marginal cost of interior volume decreases with size, so the question of an "awesome house" kinda changes. What people expect to be paid for labour is also higher.

Brick is not a panacea, when it comes to building houses. It is an efficient thermal conductor, so insulation is more difficult, the way you have to fasten the interior of the house to it causes thermal bridging. Common ways of constructing brick buildings can cause condensation on the inside in cold winters, which can cause damage and harm air quality.

There are two and three hundred year old timber homes. It is quite doable if you have large enough overhangs, and a durable roof.

Also keep in mind Russia and Kazakhstan have a completely different climate to most of North America.

Then on top of all of this, a lot of North Americans think of houses very differently. There are people who are building for a lifetime and a legacy, but most are content to have a comfortable sizeable dwelling which isn't going to collapse. It's fine to build a mediocre timber home, if it means that people get more or less what they wanted. As somebody who appreciates fine quality housing, I'd like it another way, but it seems that my fellow North Americans have something else in mind, and that's their business.

It's fine to build a mediocre timber home

How do you have sex in that? How do your teenagers have sex in that? Is that what you wanted or merely what you put up with because you don't know that it could be done any better?

Also: open plan kitchen. You can't cook in there; if you do everything smells of cooking and it covered with oil mist in short order. You can't remodel, because you house is your biggest tax-free leveraged savings vehicle and Americans are surprisingly conformist; your remodel just won't sell.

Are you alright? I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

I don't generally put up with it, but who am I to dictate everyone else's standards for their own living?

> Also: open plan kitchen. You can't cook in there; if you do everything smells of cooking and it covered with oil mist in short order

Open plan kitchens are fine if you have a proper range hood, but yeah, some people undersize their range hoods... but also lots of people don't cook much.

Not the OP, but I guess the sex thing was about sound proofing.

I doubt most kitchens have a hood at all. I’ve seen a whole lot more of those fans that just spit the air right back into the room, through ineffective filters that no-one ever cleans or replaces, than real hoods. Those don’t seem to become common until you’re also looking at houses with those oversized commercial-alike ranges.

Open plan kitchen: You have a range hood. It's the standard way of exhausting cooking smells, smoke, and oil droplets. You should probably have one even if you don't have an open plan kitchen.

I like my open plan kitchen because I can be cooking, and supervising my young kid playing in the living room at the same time. Or, if guests are over, I can be cooking dinner and still be part of the conversation.

I think the you're largely observing the difference in purchasing power of a dollar between the US and eastern Europe. If you spent $200K to build a stone house, it would be much smaller (for example, in Western Europe where the purchasing power is more similar to the United States and stone construction is more common, houses tend to be much smaller than the US). This isn't to say that large houses are ideal, but Americans in general certainly tend to value living space more than Europeans.

Further, the American model might be more susceptible to damage, but the damage is more cheaply repaired. It also lends itself to remodel as trends change (e.g., central heating and airconditioning, innovations in indoor plumbing [like removing lead-based plumbing], computer networking, as well as changes in interior layout trends), which allows a property to hold more value for longer.

The difference in purchasing power comes from the difference in labor cost mainly. I think that in a construction project, labor costs are going to outweigh material costs by a lot. In such a case, it makes little sense to prefer cheap materials.

Maybe it has to do with competitions. Many old European houses are made of stone. New houses have to compare to that.

I considered getting a house designed and built here in the UK some years ago, and quickly found that the biggest cost wasn't labour, it was land.

Land anywhere you'd want to live, that has planning permission for buildings, is very expensive.

There is a lot less land in the UK than there is the US, and planning regulations can make things difficult.

Also, many european cities are build quite dense because of their age. Especially medieval town centers are build dense because building large buildings was very hard to do.

This results in many requirements for living being close together(shops, markets etc).

Also, the automobile made it possible to create large suburbs in america. In many european cities the focus on the car didn't happen because spending money on a car was not a reality for many people. (americans own considerable more cars then most europeans, and have so for decades, even compared to western european countries).

Many Europeans are lazy. They don't want to have to repair damages. They prefer to build so that damage doesn't accumulate for decades. Don't see the point in easy repairing.

Anybody semi-capable can easily modify a stick built house. And Americans _love_ to modify their houses. DIY stores are big business here. I, myself, am adding some recessed LED lights into a couple bedroom ceilings this weekend. When I'm done, apart from the light fixtures themselves, you will never know the work was done 50 years after the house was built because there are no cable raceways and no external plugs.

As an American now living in Russia (in a region with 30% Armenians), I can confirm this. Our construction quality of our house in the US is trash. It's made out of cheap pine and plywood and has terrible thermal properties. We recently had to replace all the siding because it just rotted off. Meanwhile the places in Russia are smaller, but generally higher quality (which I prefer). Also, many Russians don't take on mortgages and pay for property with cash - which is amazing considering how low salaries are vs the West (they're huge savers - at least the older generations).

the thermal properties of a wood house with insulation is far better than that of a concrete one

what about a stone/brick/concrete house with insulation?

In general, any thermally-conducting path from outside to inside will reduce the insulating value of the wall by a lot. The standard framing method used in American houses is described in basic terms here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(construction)#Balloon...

(Platform framing is different from balloon framing in some details, but that's not important for our purposes.) The gaps between the vertical "studs" allow insulation to be put in, covering ~90% of the surface area. I forget the details, but there are code and construction-method developments that are working to raise this figure closer to 100%.

The final wall would then be a roughly 7" sandwich. Details vary, but perhaps 1" exterior cladding - stucco, siding, etc., 5.5" of insulation where the frame is, 0.75" of interior wallboard ("drywall"). In older homes, alas, the insulation is thinner than 5.5".

The brick, concrete, concrete-block, and stone construction methods I know about do not allow such a thick layer of insulation. I know there are products available to get higher insulating value in less thickness, thus allowing for 3" of brick + 3" of rigid foam, but of course these are applicable to both methods.

And, as I've tried to clarify, the concrete-block methods I know about have areas where there is a non-insulating path through the concrete.

Perhaps there are other concrete or brick methods that provide significant insulating value, that I'm not aware of, that are realistic for single-family homes?

Reinforced concrete is used mostly in Spain, where I live. Then walls are either traditional bricks, or some plasterboards stuffed with insulation, or an outer layer of thin bricks, insulation, and an inner layer of plaster.

I think we're moving away from bricks because everybody has A/C now. But houses are still "solid", with a concrete skeleton and walls that you can't "punch through", at least the outer walls.

In general, concrete housing would have insulation. Though depends on the place of course, probably not in the Mediterranean while lots of it and triple glazing in the Nordics.

The legacy of the old soviet systems of tenant housing also should not be understated.

Many people of former soviet nations simply own their appartments/houses and do not have a mortage. Usually these appartments are inhereted

In southern Europe houses are also often inherited. Thus quality of the construction is important.

This is certainly true.

We do... on the East coast where the risk of a category 4 throwing a palm tree through your kitchen is higher than an earthquake causing all the bricks in your house to disassociate with one another. The Midwest is screwed either way with what tornados are capable of so they just build whatever is cheapest to rebuild

I'll point out, as a midwesterner, that while we have tornadoes, they have a VERY narrow footprint vs a flood or earthquake or hurricane. There's plenty of houses around that are 50 to 100 years old.

But yes, the preferred strategy for dealing with a tornado is a basement, below-ground shelter (aka root cellar) or concrete-and-steel "panic room", all of which are designed to protect the occupants, not the entire house.

I am temporarily living outside USA in a concrete walled apartment. The concrete cracks constantly, tiles fall off the walls, and the door fitting seems to be totally variable based on temp and humidity.

I miss living in houses made of wood. And how easily central air systems are installed in wooden homes.

This is just bad house. I'm sure that one could find comparably bad wood house. Usually nothing like that is happening.

It seems you live in a shitty apartment then. Plenty of concrete apartments all over the world are well built.

I have never found an answer to this question, especially given the thermal efficiency costs. Homes in Crimea have meter-thick walls and hold insulation really well, that's actually a huge point considering how high my monthly electric bill is.

Anyway, ONE reason is that the drywall home is more pliable - you can adjust the layout and change out the wiring / piping with relative ease. Of course, at that point you don't have much house left, other than a few supporting structures.

The American home is really the cement basement/foundation (outside of Florida), a carrier beam or two across the basement (metal) and a few wood carrier beams on the upper floor / floors. Insulation is typically fiberglass. After that, there is not much substance to it. The brick on the outside does not bear weight.

They do last a decent amount of time when maintained though. Then again, maintenance is high.

Financialisation of land due to banking. The more land costs the less you have for materials.

Americans tear down houses a lot more often than Russians and former Soviet client nations do. The housing sector in the US represents an oversized % of its GDP. In fact there are a number of sectors (health care/insurance, housing, military, VA) that are super gigantic compared to even a well off OECD country that, if sized down to a more "normal" level, would turn America into just another average OECD country. Something that might be really great for a number of reasons.

> In Russia and in Kazakhstan everyone builds house with thick (70-150 cm) walls with bricks and with good foundation. Even poor people don't build houses from plywood. But in America it seems that everyone, poor and rich builds extremely fragile houses.

Not everyone. In the more rural areas there are a lot of farm houses build very solidly.

These are usually build according to traditional techniques stemming from the European guilds of carpenters and masons.

1) As others pointed out, need to account for seismic activity.

2) The invention of air conditioning (and low prices for heating) allow inefficient architectures while maintaining reasonable comfort.

3) Corporatization of construction led to structures that are efficient and quick to erect.

4) Insurability of a tract house with standard architecture is much better, due to predictable materials + labor costs.

I imagine part of it is that we want big houses in the US, so cheaper materials allow a bigger house without a linear increase in costs. Also, I believe lumber is cheaper here. Wood houses are also popular in Norway, where wood is cheap.

Almost every town has some code that says you can't do that.

Or the house is already built, and tearing it down to make a brick one is $$$ plus permit maybe will be denied.

And most homebuilding companies only use wood.

Brick houses don't fare well in seismic areas (think California) and they're more costly/time consuming to fix in areas frequently visited by tornadoes.

The entirety of the American West is subject to seismic areas. We're still having aftershocks from a magnitude 6.5 earlier this week in Central Idaho.

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/#%7B%22autoUpdat...

For one thing most of America is at a much lower latitude than most of Russia and Kazakhstan. Houses don't need as much insulation to be habitable in the winter.

Yes and this influences even the places at higher latitudes. I live in WA state and it's very clear that during the 50s-90s a lot of the residential construction here was influenced by what was going on in California. I know a lot of trades people that moves up from CA in that time.

So the houses are not built to adequately handle rain and are drafty due to colder temps here. WA state finally started instituting more specific build codes that match the region in the late 90s and 2000s

Climate in much of the US is far from being mild. Winters are pretty cold at lower latitudes, and summers can be very hot.

The energy costs are probably a major part of the equation. Heating/AC costs are lower so it doesn't make sense to invest in energy efficiency. Same as low gas prices with very lightly taxed fuel compared to other western countries. This all has to change with the global warming threat (the much worse alternative of giving up on it, of course exists too)

Come on, brick wall of 150cm? It's insane, no one builds that for individual house.

One thing is that we Americans loooove remodeling our houses. We have whole TV channels dedicated to the topic. So, besides the benefits that other people have mentioned here, wood-frame structures are easy to change to suit our needs.

what constitutes remodeling? Changing the entire layout of the house?

because from my experience, nearly all houses in my country have the same kind of layout. Having lived in both pre and post ww2 housing. The major differences seem to be:

- new, post ww2 houses have larger kitchens - old, pre ww2 houses seem to have a smaller living room and a "front room" (with load bearing walls in between). Modern houses have these rooms combined into a larger, single living room. - the bathroom in post world war 2 houses are considerably larger.

Also, what is the deal with many american houses having multiple bathrooms with showers/baths in them?

Having multiple bathrooms (with showers) is nice because in the mornings people can get ready in parallel rather than in serial and so people are less likely to be late. It's a good thing to have, but yes, it isn't really a necessity. It's a relatively new thing even in America -- the 1960s era house I grew up in America in the 1970s-1980s had just one bathroom for the whole family.

> But in America it seems that everyone, poor and rich builds extremely fragile houses.

Not everyone. In "flyover country" there are a lot of solid craftsmen doing solid work.

Americans and Australians still haven't learned about double glazing.

Definitely one of the more 'wtf' moments when I moved.

Most new houses have double glazed windows. The cost to renovate all the windows in an old house usually doesn’t pay off in increased efficiency. The biggest bang for the buck is usually increasing insulation of walls and attics.

> The biggest bang for the buck is usually increasing insulation of walls and attics

Take out a FLIR imager and observe that every window is a black hole compared to even poorly insulated walls.

I was told it would cost $80,000 to redo all the windows in my house.

This feeds back into OP's point - the costs are loony. There's maybe 8k worth of materials and labour to double glaze a house (and that's still on the really high end), not 80. If the average Armenian can afford it, there's no natural reason why the average American shouldn't be able to.

Armenia did not spend the last few decades convincing it’s children that only losers go into trades, so the wages an armenian window installer are quite a bit lower

> Armenia did not spend the last few decades convincing it’s children that only losers go into trades

Doing labor has been stigmatized in most of the world for the last few thousand years. You could be excluded from "polite society" on the strength of a rumor that you personally produced goods you sold.

Of course, for most of history, there were a large number of people who knew they stood at the bottom of society and so were willing to do these sorts of jobs anyway, but that's not quite the same issue.

Much of the "progress" of the last few thousand years, and in particular the last few hundred, has been the move away from the sort "polite society"-centric policies and towards a model in which we recognize the value of so many different kinds of human activities.

Besides, I think the comment you were replying to was really about the almost complete absence of post-secondary "technical education" in the USA, in particular when compared to countries like Germany.

> Besides, I think the comment you were replying to was really about the almost complete absence of post-secondary "technical education" in the USA, in particular when compared to countries like Germany.

Are these two different phenomena? If there are more glaziers in Armenia than there are in America, is that because Armenia sends the message "glaziers are winners" and America says "glaziers are losers", or because America sends the message "no matter who you are, you're a winner, and therefore you shouldn't be a glazier" while Armenia is fine with telling its losers that maybe winning isn't for them and they should consider being a glazier?

In a country that sends a clear message that "being a plumber is an important and rewarding job with above-median-income job", more people will entertain aspirations to become a plumber.

In a country that sends the message "being a plumber means you're fairly stupid, have no other talents and are doing a nasty, dirty usless job", people won't aspire to being plumbers.

Note that in the US at least, experienced & skilled plumbers are paid above median income (in some cases, a lot above median).

> Note that in the US at least, experienced & skilled plumbers are paid above median income (in some cases, a lot above median).

Something analogous is true in India, where men are willing to take substantial pay cuts (~50%) in order to hold a white-collar job instead of a blue-collar job. They do that because women don't want to marry blue-collar workers.

Focusing on income levels in marketing to the men would seem to be misplaced.

A home's worth of windows and labor for 8k? What market is that?

You may have been told that, but that is not a good offer.

this is a bold claim from someone who was no other information about iends's home (overall size, number of windows, size/shape of existing windows, local labor market, etc.).

WTF? Are they all non-standard sizes so you’d either need custom windows or extensive framing work? Usual replacement cost is more like $200-300 per window, installed, maybe somewhat more if you want something fancy, but not... thousands.

200-300 sounds like a good price for standard size double hung.

I am guessing the person above got a quote for premium custom windows in a large house.

I have odd-ball sizes in my home that aren't double-hung style, and basic vinyl double-pane windows were about 1,000/ea on average.

I j know someone who replaced all their non-standard dimension windows on a 2500sf house with double pane windows and it was 30k. So 80k sounds high, unless it’s a really big house.

If you have stucco, then the stucco repair can exceed 10k on its own.

True, but even relatively efficient windows are like holes compared to insulated walls. If you have a whole wall that is losing heat, fixing that is cheaper and more effective than upgrading a few square feet of windows. The best (triple paned) windows are still only equivalent to R-5.

yes, and it will still look like this even with the best triple-pane insulated glass. it's an inherent property of transparent materials. unless your house has an unusually large amount of window area, it's more cost effective to just consider the windows a loss and spray a foot of foam insulation across your entire attic.

Or zoning your HVAC if you have a multilevel. I've heard that does wonders.

The house building quality like windows was a big surprise for me too when moving to the US.

Currently more and more houses do triple glassing by default in Switzerland. Double glassing is already done since the 80’s and mandatory for all new house since a long time.

Obviously its more expensive so energy saving standards and energy prices have a lot of impact on how houses are built or renovated. Especially in Texas energy is cheap and I can see that there are not a lot of incentives to invest in lower energy usage by building more expensive.

Stacked cinderblocks are dangerous in areas with powerful earthquakes and tornadoes.

When you step out of the wood frame and asphalt roof mold, construction is considered specialized and costs go way up. You could use, for example, concrete masonry units or aerated concrete panels, and a metal roof. Your costs probably just doubled per square foot.

Sure, but it's specialized because not enough people do it, so not enough people know how to do it, so that's no explanation. You're basically saying "Americans don't build with brick because they don't build with brick".

It's the same phenomenon as in the Eastern Bloc countries, where the state subsidized prefab concrete construction and left the building trade to starve. The result was cheap housing for millions (sorely needed after the destructions of the War) and complete destruction of the construction trades.

That’s exactly what I’m saying. There’s a chicken and egg problem. Perhaps an entrepreneur could change things but I think you’d have to be ready to lose a lot of money before getting traction.

In South Florida wood-framed buildings are rare and most small buildings, e.g., houses, are made from concrete masonry units -- or at least that was the case when I left in 1984. "CBS" it used to be called: "concrete block structure".

South Florida is a different business environment and metal roofs are also not overly expensive there.

If you built with brick that would be against code and you’d be incredibly likely to die if there is an earthquake.

Additionally, Americans are fairly fond of tearing down existing structures to rebuild which is harder to do with brick.

Thirdly, wood is an abundant resource in the US.

Not saying it is a good reason, but wood is more flexible so resist better to earthquake. Brick and concrete will crack more easily even if you have many small imperceptible tremors. So in some area it may make sense. I agree though it's weird.

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