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Comment by oneTbrain23 | Hacker News Reader

Still cheaper and sturdier than the cardboard house in USA. European houses typivally made of brivks and mortar. Cant say that in USA. Even 5mil house in San Fra, a significant portions the house is made of wood and drywall. Pounching through American wall is hollywood pastime. Cant find a similar think in other countries hollywood.

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I’d like to see a European brick and mortar house survive a Magnitude 8 earthquake, which is a requirement in San Francisco. The US used to have lots of brick and mortar construction, just like Europe. After those buildings were all destroyed by strong earthquakes, they switched to steel and wood, which can survive a strong earthquake. Europe style construction is not allowed in much of the US because it demonstrably isn’t safe.

And yet, most residential construction is basically the same, whether it's going to be built in Palo Alto, upstate NY, Kansas, south Florida or Portland. Most of those don't have anything that even resembles strong earthquake risk.

American housing is built the way it is not due to extra interest in safety, but because it's cheap to build under US prices. You can call it better or worse than Europe, but it sure isn't earthquakes.

>And yet, most residential construction is basically the same, whether it's going to be built in Palo Alto, upstate NY, Kansas, south Florida or Portland

This was the case but it's not really true any more. Building codes have become more stringent and risk specific. This hasn't changed anything around earthquakes though as as building a single story wood building that stands up to an earthquake is easy, building one that withstands a hurricane is harder.

What is the advantage of using stronger building materials? Say brick vs wood frames.

It's not necessarily about strength but brick buildings will survive both fire and water much better than wooden buildings, they don't burn or rot. Brick buildings generally last hundreds of years with minimal maintenance (assuming no earthquakes).

Wood buildings can last hundreds of years but require far more upkeep.

This argument kind of falls apart when you start trying to maintain or improve plumbing, HVAC, and electrical through the house. It's much easier to do that through the wood and drywall of a typical American house.

AFAIK Plumbing tends to run beneath the floors in either construction model. Electrical in brick buildings is a pain as it runs in conduit behind the plaster but this doesn't compromise the viability of your structure and has a fairly long service life.

HVAC also can generally also be run under floors (and outside of the USA forced air systems are pretty unusual so you're only dealing with pipes).

> I’d like to see a European brick and mortar house survive a Magnitude 8 earthquake, which is a requirement in San Francisco.

Sorry to put it this way, but is this a joke? I do live in Bucharest, in Eastern Europe, on the 8th floor of an apartments building built in the early 1980s, and I sure do hope that this building can withstand a Magnitude 8 earthquake seeing that we've had a 7.5 earthquake back in 1977 and a 7.7 one back in 1940 (and a 7.1 earthquake back in 1986, which I do remember).

The Richter scale is logarithmic, so I wonder how well a structure built to withstand an earthquake the magnitude of Romania’s previous earthquakes could withstand a Magnitude 8 earthquake.

When the huge construction boom began in Cluj in the first decade of the new millennium, the common opinion seemed to be that the old, ugly socialist-era blocks would survive an earthquake just fine, but people were less confident about the new buildings that private developers were constructing.

> I’d like to see a European brick and mortar house survive a Magnitude 8 earthquake, which is a requirement in San Francisco.

This is how modern European brick houses are built:

https://stock.adobe.com/de/images/unfinished-brick-house-sti...

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