That attitude goes back at least to Thomas Jefferson. Here's a letter he wrote in 1791:
A country whose buildings are of wood, can never increase in its improvements to any considerable degree. There duration is highly estimated at 50 years. Every half century then our country becomes a tablua rasa, whereon we have to set out anew, as in the first moment of seating it. Whereas when buildings are of durable materials, every new edifice is an actual and permanent acquisition to the state, adding to is value as well as to its ornament.
Any argument that wooden houses last 100+ years is ignoring survivorship bias :) But even granting that, 100 years is not a very long time - just over one lifetime. If your parents lived in a wooden house, your children will need to build a new one.
I agree with you that 100 years is not very long - I chose that number because a lot of communities in America aren't a lot older than that. The idea of a suburb didn't really catch on until after WWII, so we don't really have much data on those beyond 60 years. And even beyond that, a lot of areas in the midwest/west weren't very settled until around the turn of the century, so permanent structures from before then are not common.
> There duration is highly estimated at 50 years. Every half century then our country becomes a tablua rasa, whereon we have to set out anew, as in the first moment of seating it.
Maybe this was rhetoric (? who was that letter addressed to, and what was his purpose in writing it?), but I can't fathom the thinking that the entire country's buildings would simultaneously fail, in lockstep, every 50 years.
It doesn't have to be simultaneous. If buildings last about 50 years, then in 50 years you're going to have completely different set of buildings. You'll have no influences to draw on from 50+ years ago.
A country whose buildings are of wood, can never increase in its improvements to any considerable degree. There duration is highly estimated at 50 years. Every half century then our country becomes a tablua rasa, whereon we have to set out anew, as in the first moment of seating it. Whereas when buildings are of durable materials, every new edifice is an actual and permanent acquisition to the state, adding to is value as well as to its ornament.
Any argument that wooden houses last 100+ years is ignoring survivorship bias :) But even granting that, 100 years is not a very long time - just over one lifetime. If your parents lived in a wooden house, your children will need to build a new one.