American houses

[MillicentBystander2022]

I'm watching Earthstorm on Netflix and I can't understand why the houses are so badly built over there. Why don't they build proper brick houses? Surely it would mean far less damage and devastation come hurricane season?

Availability of building materials. They have far more wood than they have clay.

Not all areas have hurricane seasons though and wood framed are much quicker and cheaper to construct

Timber houses are cheaper and don't require foundations - in a lot of placed they're built on a frame or stilts, making them a lot faster to construct.

I know it isn't all areas, but for the places that do have hurricanes and tornadoes, wouldn't less flimsy houses help? One big storm and your house is gone, along with everything in it.

I suppose there is a reason for it, otherwise they wouldn't keep building the houses like that. Still devastating for the people living in those areas, though.

I live in the Midwest in the US. The houses are not flimsy. It's just that tornadoes are that destructive. In the 1970s I worked at a hospital that was mostly destroyed by a tornado. If definitely was not flimsy. We do have a new type of wind storm that is causing some concern it's called a Derecho.

The (new) building codes are quite stringent in certain areas (miami comes to mind) as long as corners are not cut. I was in an ex-pat section of Washington, DC near Mass Ave with many solid brick homes, and we experienced a Derecho. It just sheared trees. Literally a path of destruction. A sheared giant poplar on top of your sturdy brick house will do serious damage.

Brick houses would be destroyed in tornadoes as well and will have to be demolished and rebuilt. You can’t just patch and go when the structure of a brick building has been compromised.

I live in what is considered "Tornado Alley".Of course all homes are built differently and can recieve damage.
Recently one hit our small town and no homes where damaged but 2 businesses lost their roofs.
It all just depends on it's severity.
New homes are built very tough,basically they have to be.

Most houses in this bit of Canada are timber on a concrete basement. We don’t get too many hurricanes but we do get massive hailstones and lots of wildfires.

Access to bricks is a very valid point. Wood is easier and cheaper to ship. When you’re surrounded by forest, with 10,000 trees for every person, it’s the most viable option.

There are brick houses in America - in big cities. In South Florida a fair bit of construction is in concrete/cinder block, and there's adobe in parts of the Southwest.

Timber framing is the norm in much of North America for historical reasons: lots of wood. However timber is also a good choice in a climate with extreme weather and it's also more suitable than brick in earthquake zones. You don't build unreinforced brick (no steel skeleton) on the west coast, it's illegal in California I think. And brick can be destroyed in a tornado as well. Brick is only safer for fire.

Europeans scoff at American houses but if they're built properly they do last. In New England there's 400 year old houses. Even the 100+ year old Sears kit houses (where you'd order all the bits from the catalogue and were responsible for putting it up yourself!) are still standing all over the country.

Now, the roof shingles that need redoing every 20 years--I wish we had tiles.

Plenty of reasons: cost (including transport across vast distances from kiln to building site), availability, durability in an extreme climate (mostly the far more extreme winters).

There are some places in the US where brick is commonly used, like parts of Texas and California, where clay would be readily available.

I'm currently sitting in my apartment which was carved out of a massive wood frame farmhouse built in the 1880s. It has a deep basement whose foundation is 18 inches thick. Sometimes when we have a terrific windstorm (recent derechos spring to mind) we can feel a little shaking. It bends but doesn't break, in fact. We've also experienced polar vortexes (vortices?) in winter and blistering heat in summer. The house has been around for almost 150 years now, clearly well built, entirely from wood.

It's flimsy homes like mobile homes set on a concrete slab, or prefabricated homes on a slab, that tend to get destroyed in a tornado, but brick schools, postal depots, etc have also been ripped apart. The one thing the flimsier homes have going for them is affordability.

This is the best answer!

America is a big place with different climates and risks. In California, houses must be built to earthquake requirements. In New Orleans, it must be able to withstand a hurricane. In the Mid-west you must have an underground tornado shelter. Colorado to the West Coast is currently updating building codes for fire and hail risk. In the South West you will find adobe homes due to high temps. In the North East you will find homes that are hundreds of years old. On the gulf coast, the water table is below sea level so no basements allowed.

We do however properly insulate our homes unlike the UK… and our new builds manage to have windows larger than portholes and still retain temperature…

Also homes are built considering the geographical location.
The coast line build for potential hurricanes,mountain areas and up North are prepared for potentially having many feet of snow sitting on the roof for extended times.Etc......

Since we have passed May and sometimes June,(tornado season) I appreciate our homes air conditioning unit so much!

Yes to all of the previous posts. I live in a three story wood framed house with a basement built in 1914. Its been updated several times and now has insulation, underfloor radiant heat, and airconditioning. I expect it will last another 50 or 100 years. We’ve lived in it for 25 years and when we sell in 10 years—if we aren’t underwater, I expect the next owners will renovate it as well. These houses last.

Lol the vast majority of houses are built on cement foundations.
Houses very near the water are built on stilts.

My house was built in the 1970s, so part of the postwar boom and supposedly not the same quality (especially for carpentry) as pre-war. But it seems to be doing fine. We've upgraded the windows to modern standards, we have heat and air-conditioning using a single set of ducts (heat pump). I'm in the mid-atlantic so it's often well below freezing in winter, hit 35C this week, and we periodically get hurricanes and nor'easters (winter storms). We also replaced the old siding with Hardieplank fibre-cement (lower maintenance than wood, but longer lasting than vinyl).

I've been surprised to see that many of the mass-produced postwar houses in American suburbs, even the ones that were really thrown up quite cheaply to take advantage of the massive demand, are not only still there but in good condition. Many have been renovated and expanded.

Another thing you'll see is brick facing over a timber frame. Fairly common in some suburbs.

Yes, American houses are built on concrete foundations. Whether it's a dug basement or a slab depends in large part on where in the country you are (and in some cases, slabs are/were used to reduce construction time and cost). Traditionally, for a dug basement, there are footings that go down below the frost line. VERY important in colder parts of the continent!

Wood construction is much safer in an earthquake. (Or light gauge steel framing, but it's expensive.)

The earthquake safety aspect makes sense. It wasn't a dig or scoffing at US housing, I just wondered the reasoning behind it.

A strong tornado can rip apart a brick house just as easily as a wooden one. To the poster who thinks most American houses have no foundations… what?? Most are built on a cement foundation. In places like Kansas and Oklahoma, almost all (except for 60s slab homes and mobile homes) will also have a cellar or basement. It’s the basement that will save your bacon in a tornado, not having a brick home.

The earthquake issue is why you see most houses in California (and other western states which have earthquakes) built from wood and with no basements. Interestingly there are newer materials which could be a better substitute, but a shortage of skilled workers to work with these materials and tools for large scale building. (The electricity company just replaced a 60' tall wooden electricity supply pole in my neighbor's backyard with a new wooden one because the old one had rotted (it was 80 years old) and I asked why they didn't replace it with a concrete pole and was told that although the concrete ones were better/more durable/lighter....they would need different large equipment to install them and that they didn't have the funding for the new equipment as it was very expensive.)

In earthquake zones wood can be better because it has give

I have to stop by and post a photo I took while on vacation this week. While in South Dakota, we saw this house and I immediately thought of this thread. Sad, I know. LOL

It was ordered from a Sears Roebuck catalog, then assembled on site. It is still lived in today. I wish I could remember what year the guide said it was built.

If you are a nerd like me and like to learn random crap you will never need, this website has the archives of the homes available through Sears and the years they were available.

I couldn't find this house, but I suspect it has been added on to since it was built.

I also took some photos of some really old (for US standards 😂) homes that are still standing today, though not lived in obviously.

This house was built during the gold booms in the late 1880's.