In America? Really? I've never lived in a wooden house, so I cannot imagine what it's like. My mind always connects the wooden structures with fire and woodworms, ie. perceives it as an unreliable building material.
That's why I'm also very surprised when I see such buildings. Even the ones I show in the post. Most likely, they also required huge maintenance efforts over the years, otherwise they could not have survived so far.
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Yep, I think it's the most common building material here. Of course, it's usually covered in other things - so they're doing the framing of the house in wood and put insulation in between the wood beams, with drywall (plasterboard) on the inside which is what gets painted. On the outside there's plywood and a plastic sheet to seal it in from water and then whatever cladding, which might be wood, aluminum, fake stone, etc. And yeah - fake stone, not real stone! They will put up a sheet of what looks like a stone wall but it's really resin or something. It's all lightweight and cheap, and that's the idea; houses in the US have gotten bigger over the decades and it's cheaper to build with wood so you can have a bigger house made of wood for the same price as a smaller house built out of something else.
Of course, yeah, it is more prone to fires, and termites, and rotting and mold and all the other problems that come with making your house out of wood. But it's cheap and fast, and that's pretty demonstrative of how the US works. 😂
I had a friend who lived in a ~100 year old house that had been turned into apartments, and it had NO insulation or anything, so it was wooden frame - wooden slats, the end. I live in Denver, which has really cold winters, so while I'm sure that was nice to air out in the hot summers, in the winter her apartment was FREEZING no matter how high she had the heat on. You'd have to sit inside with your winter coat on. She had a plant literally climbing up the inside of her living room wall from the outside. You'd think it was a fancy house from the outside, as it was big and pretty - but terrible to actually live in!
No, it's just because it's cheap for the builders, and not about quality or lowering the cost for people living in the houses at all. Houses like this cost hundreds of thousands of dollars - the average house price in my city, I just looked, is $568,178.
Some people say it's more eco-friendly to build with wood because it's renewable, rather than concrete, which causes a lot of carbon. But the developers building things really don't care about that, they just care about cost. They'd use concrete if it was cheaper.