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