The fire risk has very little to do with the material itself, and everything to do with how it's used. Steel buildings can fail even faster than wood once the s

The fire risk has very little to do with the material itself, and everything to do with how it's used. Steel buildings can fail even faster than wood once the steel reaches a superheated temperature, and wood can take an exceptionally long time to burn depending on multiple factors, from thickness, to oxygen, to fire travel pathways, to fireproof paneling. The reason residential buildings are constructed with a given material is usually due to the regional cost of each material. Wood is cheap and plentiful in the USA, and we've adapted it very successfully with modern building codes. But of course that cost changes with scale, as wood is not nearly as strong and light as steel, or as stiff and compressive as concrete. And our somewhat antiquated zoning laws also limit newer construction methods like post-and-beam, which results in larger, cheaper, faster to construct wood-framed homes.