Some of ye olde concrete prefabs are standing now for over a century. As are brick buildings.
It could be fixed by turning wood into polymer reinforced wood, but that is an entirely different building method, closer to brick.
I was surprised myself. Even more so when you hear that most old concrete or brick town houses have been either destroyed and rebuilt or structurally renovated in the last 40 years or so.
Only using old growth as a source of wood would cause quick deforestation of the remaining old growth forests and nature reserves only for the trees to be replaced with the worse trees we use today. It would only work once, the next generations would still get the crappy quick lumber we use today or be stuck without wood while waiting for forests to regrow, so it's not really an option. If we go for wooden houses everywhere, we're going to need to use the "industrial" wood.
Source: carpenter
Many of those issues are mitigated by chemically treating the woods, but that does not last forever...
There are however at least thousands of trees for every person living here so that couldn't be scaled to a city.
It does take more energy to fabricate, but still much less than concrete and steel.
If a wooden beam is exposed to fire, the outside chars yet it still retains almost its full structural strength.
A steel beam almost certainly needs to be replaced.
Of course all this can be achieved differently but charring usually lasts much longer than other surface treatments.
It used to be common in Japan (yakisugi) but I assume this must have been common throughout the world.
According to him it’s very in demand, and it can rival traditional building methods.