4 ms·

Anyone can build houses out of more expensive materials, if they're ready to pay for it. America has an abundance of wood so wood framing houses seems sensible.

astrange 3y ago
You can't make statements like that about America in general. Every piece of it has completely different and extremely opinionated housing regulations. Partly as protectionism for the wood homebuilders, so that nobody tries making them in factories.
- chmod600 3y ago
  This is the first I've heard that houses here are made of wood due to some kind of conspiracy.
  - astrange 3y ago
    Wouldn't call the building trades union influence on laws a conspiracy. It's their job and they do it in public. We used to have factory-built Sears houses though. And now we don't.
  - loeg 3y ago
    There is a wood construction lobby. It's not a conspiracy theory, just the ordinary kind of political self-interest advocacy by lumber sellers. There are also steel and cement lobbies.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      Is the wood lobby so much stronger that somehow ordinary American families are punished in some obscure way for daring to have a house made out of steel or concrete?
      - loeg 3y ago
        No. American houses are built of wood for straightforward economic reasons.
        astrange 3y ago
        There's some endogeneity though (sorry for the big word). Wood houses are cheaper because the lobbying got the other cheap ways to build housing made illegal. For instance, if you can't build anything more than one story, can't make an apartment, or can't run a corner store out of your house, then it's not productive enough to pay for the construction costs of anything else. Fire codes are also a lot of it. That's the kind of thing that seems reasonable, then you go back and look at old speeches and they're just saying stuff like "we must make up expensive safety laws for apartments or else black people will move in".
- googlryas 3y ago
  Houses are made in factories in America, and they are generally regarded as a supremely inferior product, at the very least because of width constraints for shipping them via trucks on highways. In what countries can you get high quality factory-built housing?
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    They mean the components, presumably.
  - astrange 3y ago
    You could in the past relative to the quality of average homes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes Currently you can't get them in other countries, if by houses you mean buildings shaped like American houses. That's because we made it illegal to build any other type. https://www.construction-physics.com/p/japans-skyscraper-factories https://www.construction-physics.com/p/japans-skyscraper-fac... (Also recommend reading everything else he wrote. This is an inaccurate summary of it.) Also, here's a building in Seattle that's a new type of wood called "mass timber" that can be built very quickly and cheaply. It wasn't legal until recently, and I'm not sure if it is in other cities yet. https://x.com/bobbyfijan/status/1639720917042438145 https://x.com/bobbyfijan/status/1639720917042438145
tamimio 3y ago
Concrete will be better for both long term and safety, especially when major cities in US are in direct contact with hurricanes/tornadoes. P.S. no clue why my previous comment was deleted.. is HN run by house developer/contractors that the use of anything than wood will threaten their profit!? It’s no brainer to use something stronger, better, safer, and definitely environmentally friendly cutting trees for wood, it’s hypocritical to say “save a tree” when printing an email but you don’t mind to destroy a whole forest to build houses or even to make toilet papers.. it would make sense to have these houses built primarily using wood in the 50s where everything was simpler and definitely not as costly, but paying ~$800k for a paper house that will literally fly away in the next tornado, is a state-sponsored scam.
- gus_massa 3y ago
  Your previous comment is not deleted, it's only marked as [dead] and hidden. Anyone can see it if they go to their profile[1] and enable "showdead". I think your comment got too many flags and downvotes, and it got automatically killed by the system. You can email the mods to get an official explanation. I guess people flagged/downvoted it for the tone A similar comment is still alive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37195133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37195133 . The replies say that apparently wood is better than concrete for earthquakes (but I'm not sure[2]). [1] Your profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tamimio https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tamimio [2] Disclaimer: Happy from my concrete house in a non-seismic non-hurricane zone.

astrange 3y ago

You can't make statements like that about America in general. Every piece of it has completely different and extremely opinionated housing regulations. Partly as protectionism for the wood homebuilders, so that nobody tries making them in factories.

chmod600 3y ago
This is the first I've heard that houses here are made of wood due to some kind of conspiracy.
- astrange 3y ago
  Wouldn't call the building trades union influence on laws a conspiracy. It's their job and they do it in public. We used to have factory-built Sears houses though. And now we don't.
- loeg 3y ago
  There is a wood construction lobby. It's not a conspiracy theory, just the ordinary kind of political self-interest advocacy by lumber sellers. There are also steel and cement lobbies.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Is the wood lobby so much stronger that somehow ordinary American families are punished in some obscure way for daring to have a house made out of steel or concrete?
    - loeg 3y ago
      No. American houses are built of wood for straightforward economic reasons.
      - astrange 3y ago
        There's some endogeneity though (sorry for the big word). Wood houses are cheaper because the lobbying got the other cheap ways to build housing made illegal. For instance, if you can't build anything more than one story, can't make an apartment, or can't run a corner store out of your house, then it's not productive enough to pay for the construction costs of anything else. Fire codes are also a lot of it. That's the kind of thing that seems reasonable, then you go back and look at old speeches and they're just saying stuff like "we must make up expensive safety laws for apartments or else black people will move in".
googlryas 3y ago
Houses are made in factories in America, and they are generally regarded as a supremely inferior product, at the very least because of width constraints for shipping them via trucks on highways. In what countries can you get high quality factory-built housing?
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  They mean the components, presumably.
- astrange 3y ago
  You could in the past relative to the quality of average homes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears_Modern_Homes Currently you can't get them in other countries, if by houses you mean buildings shaped like American houses. That's because we made it illegal to build any other type. https://www.construction-physics.com/p/japans-skyscraper-factories https://www.construction-physics.com/p/japans-skyscraper-fac... (Also recommend reading everything else he wrote. This is an inaccurate summary of it.) Also, here's a building in Seattle that's a new type of wood called "mass timber" that can be built very quickly and cheaply. It wasn't legal until recently, and I'm not sure if it is in other cities yet. https://x.com/bobbyfijan/status/1639720917042438145 https://x.com/bobbyfijan/status/1639720917042438145

tamimio 3y ago

Concrete will be better for both long term and safety, especially when major cities in US are in direct contact with hurricanes/tornadoes. P.S. no clue why my previous comment was deleted.. is HN run by house developer/contractors that the use of anything than wood will threaten their profit!? It’s no brainer to use something stronger, better, safer, and definitely environmentally friendly cutting trees for wood, it’s hypocritical to say “save a tree” when printing an email but you don’t mind to destroy a whole forest to build houses or even to make toilet papers.. it would make sense to have these houses built primarily using wood in the 50s where everything was simpler and definitely not as costly, but paying ~$800k for a paper house that will literally fly away in the next tornado, is a state-sponsored scam.

gus_massa 3y ago
Your previous comment is not deleted, it's only marked as [dead] and hidden. Anyone can see it if they go to their profile[1] and enable "showdead". I think your comment got too many flags and downvotes, and it got automatically killed by the system. You can email the mods to get an official explanation. I guess people flagged/downvoted it for the tone A similar comment is still alive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37195133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37195133 . The replies say that apparently wood is better than concrete for earthquakes (but I'm not sure[2]). [1] Your profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tamimio https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tamimio [2] Disclaimer: Happy from my concrete house in a non-seismic non-hurricane zone.