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.