Re: wood: In Japan where I live, wood was always the traditional building material as it has "give" in an earthquake, but anti-seismic concrete-and-steel is good too, in fact probably better (and is far less likely to kill you in a fire).
Europeans also used to build with a lot of wood, but by the 16th century or so we were literally running out of trees, so brick and stone became commoner across the UK and a lot of Europe. When Europeans went to America, they settled across a land that had huge forests and no shortage of timber, and then of course America made the transition towards fossil fuels before the forests could run out, and is still thinly populated compared with most of Europe. So there is ample timber for building.
In addition, many European countries have had to limit sprawl for various reasons and build up their cities more densely, which has encouraged a continued move towards non-combustible materials, as you really don't want densely packed cities full of wooden buildings for obvious reasons (Old Japanese cities used to do this, and they were constantly burning down!).
The US, which made the decision to build its cities around the car, allowed them to sprawl to very large sizes with very low-density suburbs, meaning that they have tended to continue to feel that's "safe" to use combustible materials for suburban houses. The trouble is that that strategy can't keep going forever, because as cities continue to sprawl, they start to expand into fire-risk areas (and flood-prone areas as well, for that matter), meaning that even the 'burbs start to be at risk of massive fires, as we are seeing now.