i don't know what the situation is on other continents but i've sure seen a lot of photos and videos of concrete and brick buildings
The few exceptions are in the densest cities in the US, like New York, where new construction is concrete and steel.
Canada, I am sure, is the same. Mexico and South America, not so sure. I have been around some places in Central America that have tons of wood construction, and so did the parts of Argentina and Brazil I have seen, but you may have better information. Many houses that you think are concrete or brick actually have a wood frame.
remember there's a billion people living in america. only a third of those are in the usa, and the people in the usa are much more urbanized, meaning less buildings per person. canada is another 4% of the total american population. so roughly three quarters of the buildings in america are outside the usa and canada
there's also a coincidental factor, though; wood is cheap where forests are abundant, and although having abundant natural resources such as arable land and wood doesn't guarantee wealth, exhausting your natural resources through deforestation and desertification virtually guarantees poverty.
as for 'cheaper', well, the numerator is dollars, but what's the denominator? i would say it's 'house', but neither concrete nor wood is sold by the house; cement and sand and gravel and rebar are sold by the kilo, and wood is sold by the square meter. so we need some way to make them comparable
one approach is to try to compute 'cost per strength', on the theory that a house's worth of materials is enough materials to be strong enough to work as a house. but there are two different kinds of strength involved here. floors and roofs must resist flexure without breaking, and materialswise, that mostly depends on the material's tensile strength. they also must resist impact loadings, which depends on tensile strength but also flexibility: a more flexible floor can elastically absorb a greater impact energy before reaching the same tensile strain, and a tougher material is one that has a higher elastic energy capacity in this sense. walls, on the other hand, mostly must resist compression from above, and typically this mostly depends on their ability to resist buckling, not their material compressive strength. resisting buckling depends on not strength but stiffness: the material of the buckling beam must not bend far enough that the beam's effective compressive stiffness starts to decrease, causing it to bend further
a lot of people confuse strength and stiffness; i recommend watching the first demo in dan gelbart's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtxA20Q-Uss, although for most of us it took a lot more than that to get enlightened
reinforced concrete (either pretensioned or in compression) gets its stiffness from sand and gravel, which are cheap as dirt (most of the cost of sand is the truck that delivers it to your building site) and its tensile strength from steel. i think the answer is that steel is in fact very much cheaper than wood per unit of either tensile strength or toughness
on the other hand, people usually build concrete walls to be much, much stiffer than wood-framed walls, so it's common for a given area of wood-framed wall to cost less than the same area of concrete wall. to compensate for this, people very commonly build the floors and frame of a building with reinforced concrete, then fill in the walls with cheap hollow brick. this is i think cheaper than a similarly non-load-bearing wood-frame wall made out of 2×4s and drywall, but not by that much
on the gripping hand, galvanized steel studs are cheaper than wooden 2×4s, and they're starting to become popular for low-cost construction, covered with drywall or cementboard
basically there's a lot of cluelessness going around in this thread by people who've apparently never thought about things like where amerigo vespucci sailed to, what columbus is said to have discovered (by landing where), where the members of the organization of american states are located, where the pan-american highway goes, etc.