Comment by handrous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by handrous | Hacker News Reader

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There are whole neighborhoods of 120+ year old wooden houses in the US. If they're cared for they look great. If they're not, they look like shit but are still standing and basically fine as long as water's been kept out (no long-term roof leaks). They're largely made of WTF-good timber by modern standards, but worse construction in other ways (balloon framing is common, for instance, and fire protection is otherwise poor as well).

Further, they're designed to exist without modern heating and cooling, and many still don't have those (or they don't work very well). Yet they stand, and often still have perfectly-aligned original wooden trim work, despite being subject to swings in internal temperature and humidity that'd ruin a modern house in a hurry (modern ones are too air-tight to survive that, aren't built with any care to wood grain direction, and use much lower-quality timber throughout, including for trim, though they may benefit from extensive use of dimensionally-stable plywood).

I live in one of those neighborhoods and the thing that kills our houses (aside from leaking roofs) is poor foundations. I've literally never heard of one of these houses falling over because of a structural issue with the actual timber it's built from. It's either that the wood has rotten because of roofing issues or (more likely) the rubble stone foundations fell apart

edit: and even if some of the wood has rotten you can almost always just replace or sister up that piece and be absolutely fine.

There is a contractor in LA that posts picture of houses they've inspected.

https://imgur.com/user/AlphaStructural

What's interesting to me is you have Europeans marveling at houses built of flimsy wood instead of strong brick and concrete. Yet except for occasional water and termite damage what's failing in these houses is the concrete and brick foundations. Not the wood framing.

Hell, concrete foundations fail badly enough to need repairs pretty commonly within the first few years on new houses, and I don't just mean normal settling. Doing concrete right takes a lot of waiting and is highly dependent on the weather, which usually means even more waiting (for enough days in a row of the right weather). Builders (understandably) hate anything with that kind of potential to throw off a schedule—unpredictability can increase the total time construction takes by much, much longer than the individual delays themselves—so some of them cut corners. They also don't like to let the ground sit as long between excavation and pouring as they should, because time is money.

I wouldn't want a concrete house in the US without inspections so strict that the inspectors basically dictate when & how concrete may be poured, and/or laws explicitly breaking corporate liability protections for failure of concrete within some long time span, or otherwise ensuring that builders care very much that their structures last several decades without needing repair. I suspect they'd be crazy-expensive as a result.

One of the things that comes up in discussions in the link above is local conditions dictate how structures are built.

In Florida a slab foundation and cinder block walls is what you want in a place with Hurricanes and a high water table.

On the California coast you want a stick built house. Because of earthquakes.

North east the frost line goes down several feet.

Lot of places you have expansive soils which will totally wreck a masonry building.

Also the problem the local workforce will be familiar with local designs. And likely to make mistakes if forced to build something different.

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