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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

"In the United States a 50-year-old house is considered old and is torn down to make room for another flimsy yet expensive structure."

This is terribly written.

Go to a city like San Francisco where there are thousands of houses over 100 years old who are still holding up well. Go to Boston and you can find ones even older. Hell, even in new cities like LA there are plenty of 1950's built houses that make up most of the housing stock. They aren't build "well" by modern standard (no shit), but they are built very solidly.

There is nothing about a wood frame house that makes it intrinsically "flimsy" or "poorly built".

Go and check out the concrete and brick houses in Asia and tell me that those are intrinsically "well built".

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If you look at the airplanes that are coming back, you can see clearly that the enemy is targeting our wings

Nice.

It’s not survivorship bias when there are vast swaths of US cities with century old wood housing.

If I had said “SF has a few examples of 100+ old homes” then sure.

You seem to be suggesting that the US has vast swathes of well-built old houses, and agreeing that what's currently built is flimsy. Is that a correct reading? If so, do you have any opinion about why what's currently built is so flimsy? The flimsiness is even more puzzling if almost everyone (among both builders and buyers) has experience with solidly built houses.

The swaths of well built, wood frame, old homes is just evidence that the author’s premise that wooden houses are intrinsically flimsy (defined as “dont last long”) is wrong.

Wood houses can be well built or not well built.

And I would argue that flimsy houses aren’t a recent phenomenon. As others pointed out, the crappy houses built 100 years ago were likely torn down.

And why are flimsy houses built? My guess is mostly cost savings either intentionally (that’s all the buyer can afford) or surreptitiously (builder cuts corners to increase profit).

And as I mentioned in another article you can have poorly built concrete buildings as well.

It’s not that one is superior to the other overall, it’s all trade offs.

I think maybe you're bar is a bit low for your comparison. I just recently moved into a old house in Sweden(ca 1845) and apart from some things being a bit dated, there's absolutely nothing wrong with the house!

That's not too say I haven't got a lot of work to do, I'm adding some extra insulation to keep heating costs down, redoing the kitchen cause I don't like the way it was done previously(from the looks of it, someone redid the kitchen probably in the 1980s or so, and with poor taste at that!), And of course, those negligent builders back in the 19th century didn't think to install fiber, so I have to fix that situation...

But hey, I've got 3 layers of brick that's been standing for nearly 180 years! The foundation is made from natural stone(is that the correct term in English?) and there isn't a crack in it!

Your comparison with cheap Asian houses is unfair since they probably don't have the money to do a better job, but Americans can't very well use that excuse!

San Francisco does not have buildings over 100 years old because the city was destroyed by an earthquake 100 years ago. Your brick house also would have been destroyed by that earthquake.

Plenty of homes survived the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, the destruction was not absolute.

The whole west coast is full of old brick houses; which were either knocked down, or have been retrofitted and reinforced. Because brick structures are inherently unstable in earthquakes.

I think he’s referring to houses built post-war till now. Read the article.

post-war housing quality was pretty good in the 50s, and started going downhill (the inverse to rising inflation) in the late 60s - 70s. Again, just like inflation, the quality bottomed out in the 80s and things started getting better. Houses built after the 2000s are not terrible. The US suffers from lack of skilled labor as starting in the post-war period we decimated our trade school system -- everyone wants to go to college and be a professional, and we hate tracking. So we are cranking out lots of people with no skills. That really hurts in construction, civil engineering, electrical engineering, machinists, etc. What helps is mass produced pre-fab components that can at least provide some consistent quality and can be put together by low-skilled workers. That has helped raise quality.

Bigger buildings - condos, etc -- are a different story because modern buildings have a lot of tech that is built to spec. It often doesn't work out. Think of it like a big software project -- there are disasters and marvels.

But the idea that homes only last 50 years and are then torn down is absurd. Not sure whether the author has never been to the US or they are intentionally trolling. Half of all US houses were built before 1980 (40 years old). 40% were built before 1970.

> Half of all US houses were built before 1980 (70 years old). 40% were built before 1970.

Some typos there, might want to fix

thanks (fixed!)

I live in a ~150 year old wood house that has no deeper issues and in the city nearby there are houses way over 500 years old standing strong.

By our standard the sentence above doesn't sound to wrong.

Intrinsically, concrete makes for a far better sound barrier. I'd rather not hear my neighbors, and it turns out using materials that aren't tissue paper really helps! If good fences make good neighbors, sound proofed walls makes it not suck to live on top of someone else.

Ironically, you can make a better sound isolation barrier using modern building materials than you can with concrete. Mass-Air-Mass. Basically, with a normal “stick built” wall with two layers of sheetrock on both sides, you can get upwards of 60Db of reduction. Make it two decoupled walls (no sheetrock between, mind you), and you can get 80Db. That’s enough to play the drums without waking a baby in the next room.

Oh, and normal concrete walls are outright dangerous in an earthquake of any magnitude. They’re too stiff.

Fill those voids with closed-cell spray foam, and you get even better sound (and heat) insulation.

Except the cells are formed with rigid members which transmit sound (and heat) quite efficiently. Sound isolation can't just be done with mass. There has to be a decoupling you can't get with a brick wall alone.

Even advanced heating/cooling efficiency techniques with wood framed houses involve some form of isolation - no single material will exist all the way through the wall. They're decoupled with several inches of foam. Even modern studs are being built in a way to minimize the ability for them to transfer heat (Tstuds).

Having lived in concrete buildings in Asia, they do an amazing job of transmitting construction noise.

Someone drilling into concrete 2 floors above can easily be heard while in a wood frame building you wouldn’t hear it.

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