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Comment by diogocp | Hacker News Reader

> To be fair we are talking about an area of the country that is prone to seismic activity, it does limit the building materials.

Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake/tsunami/firestorm combo in 1755 that killed tens of thousands.

When the city was rebuilt, they came up with the idea of using a wooden frame structure for earthquake resistance and masonry walls for fire resistance.

Nowadays, most new buildings seem to use reinforced concrete.

I wonder if American children are taught the story of the three little pigs.

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Comments like the last here irritate me. No, we all learn that wood is the only appropriate building material and the Salesforce tower in San Francisco required a whole forest of trees to construct.

The root comment is based on a very dated concept. Of course we can built earthquake resistant megastructures from steel and concrete. A lot of that building technology was created in California. It's either naive or willfully ignorant to think we can't solve this problem.

The issue with those materials is cost. Spread out, suburban design without density is expensive and wood frame construction is a great way to affordably build housing. Wood frame single family houses are not the problem - it's how we design our cities that's the problem.

Hy from Brazil... You know, a poor country.

We make single-level houses with a reinforced concrete structure, because it's cheap.

You know what isn't cheap? Wood. Wood is incredibly expensive to put into a shape, even if you are willing to cut forests down to get it.

Wood is incredibly cheap in North America. We're not cutting down forests for it, either. Much of the wood used for residential construction is milled from trees grown specifically for that purpose.

Lumber is quite a bit lower quality than it used to be, because we're no longer using old-growth timber. Less dense wood burns faster, as does the laminated strand board that long ago replaced plywood (unless you're really fancy) (and toxic fire retardant treatments be damned).

The low cost of lumber is one of many things in America that don't make sense economically, but that persist because of momentum, with each generation receiving an inferior facsimile of what the previous ones knew. See also: car-centric policy (from infrastructure to gas prices) and retirement planning (pensions to IRAs to nothing).

> We're not cutting down forests for it, either.

The largest share of the illegal wood extracted from Brazil goes to the US.

The illegal hardwood is not used for residential framing or sheathing. It has nothing to do with fire resistance or insurance.

Most illegal wood is not hardwood.

What is not to say that most of the wood in the US is illegal. It's probably a small share. But some of your houses do pretty much chop forests down. (And your government does help fight that, but it's hard to completely stop it.)

This was surprising because here in the US, concrete is expensive to build with. I'm considering a build and by far log homes seem my cheapest option.

Yes, people from the US always say concrete is expensive and wood is cheap. And unless you are designing a tent (by the way, zinc is way cheaper than wood for a tent), only people from the US say that.

There's something distorting your economy. Concrete is incredibly cheap as a material, extremely prone to use in a large supply chain, and requires way less labor than wood.

You make houses siting over finely built wood lattices... how much do you pay to the people building those? Because I can't imagine it being justifiable with Brazilian salaries.

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