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Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm reminded of the home left standing in Mexico Beach, FL after Hurricane Michael. It had been built from concrete to withstand the wind:

https://www.icfmag.com/2019/09/mexico-beach-survivor/

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I don't understand why more houses in areas prone to wind/fire aren't built from concrete. There are large parts of the world where that is the default due to lack of wood.

The prevalence of strong earthquakes across large parts of the US explains almost all of it. It is very difficult and expensive to engineer a building with structural masonry that can survive magnitude 7-8+ earthquakes, and the building code requires it in many places (M 8.5 where I live). They used to build a lot of masonry buildings in the US just like Europe using the same techniques but they stopped doing it after they were repeatedly flattened in earthquakes.

Strong earthquakes mean you can only really build with wood or steel frames, so that is what they build with. Steel framed construction is significantly more expensive to buy, build, and maintain, so it isn’t commonly used in houses since they don’t need the extra strength.

You don’t need masonry to be fire resistant. Large brush fires would drop burning embers all over your house when I lived in the southwestern US, but the ubiquitous stucco-and-tile exteriors were largely unaffected.

Note that fire can and does compromise concrete structures anyways, and more crucially, concrete structures tend to be significantly more expensive to build. A standard wood frame house is insanely cheap to build the structure of, and unsurprisingly, consumers tend to want to build a lot very cheaply.

Finally, there are only two types of concrete: Concrete that has cracked, and concrete that hasn't cracked yet.

For several decades I cannot wrap my head around the fact that US houses are built literally from sticks, alabaster and paper, and still an order of magnitude more expensive that typical Europe concrete/masonry house.

Darwin, in northern Australia, was flattened by cyclone Tracy in 1974: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Tracy

For the next twenty or so years, most new construction was in heavy concrete that looked like it could withstand a nuclear bomb.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-31/curious-darwin-top-en...

Then the next generation apparently forgot about Tracy, and the current crop of buildings have the wispy floor to ceiling plate glass windows etc you'd see in any modern designer building slash greenhouse, which is spectacularly unsuited to a tropical climate and even worse for cyclones.

Replacing windows isn't expensive compared to a house rebuild. Seems like an entirely reasonable tradeoff for more light imo, as long as you have a safe room somewhere.

And assuming that having an entire wall blown out doesnt result in irreparable water damage inside the structure...

Your second link actually addresses that and seems to contradict your comment:

> The perception that a single-storey brick house would offer better protection from a future cyclone was largely borne out of fear rather than facts, Troppo Architects director Jo Best said. ... "I think also that there's a bit of misconception to why people think a block house is safer than a framed house. It's not the case, they are both required to meet a certain structural code and you can't get a building permit unless that happens."

Specifically, Insulated Concrete Forms (ICFs)

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