Anyone can build houses out of more expensive materials, if they're ready to pay for it. America has an abundance of wood so wood framing houses seems sensible.
P.S. no clue why my previous comment was deleted.. is HN run by house developer/contractors that the use of anything than wood will threaten their profit!? It’s no brainer to use something stronger, better, safer, and definitely environmentally friendly cutting trees for wood, it’s hypocritical to say “save a tree” when printing an email but you don’t mind to destroy a whole forest to build houses or even to make toilet papers.. it would make sense to have these houses built primarily using wood in the 50s where everything was simpler and definitely not as costly, but paying ~$800k for a paper house that will literally fly away in the next tornado, is a state-sponsored scam.
I guess people flagged/downvoted it for the tone A similar comment is still alive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37195133 . The replies say that apparently wood is better than concrete for earthquakes (but I'm not sure[2]).
[1] Your profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tamimio
[2] Disclaimer: Happy from my concrete house in a non-seismic non-hurricane zone.
Wood houses are cheaper because the lobbying got the other cheap ways to build housing made illegal.
For instance, if you can't build anything more than one story, can't make an apartment, or can't run a corner store out of your house, then it's not productive enough to pay for the construction costs of anything else.
Fire codes are also a lot of it. That's the kind of thing that seems reasonable, then you go back and look at old speeches and they're just saying stuff like "we must make up expensive safety laws for apartments or else black people will move in".
We used to have factory-built Sears houses though. And now we don't.
In what countries can you get high quality factory-built housing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes
Currently you can't get them in other countries, if by houses you mean buildings shaped like American houses. That's because we made it illegal to build any other type.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/japans-skyscraper-fac...
(Also recommend reading everything else he wrote. This is an inaccurate summary of it.)
Also, here's a building in Seattle that's a new type of wood called "mass timber" that can be built very quickly and cheaply. It wasn't legal until recently, and I'm not sure if it is in other cities yet.