this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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"But the houses there are much cheaper and lower quality"
meanwhile Usonia
cardboard houses in places with high frequency of tornadoes and other natural phenomenons.
Concrete and metal can not withstand the temperature fluctuations in the United States, that's why wood is used. If you take concrete from -10C to 40C, its going to crack and fail after a few years.
The problem is that the wood has gotten significantly more cheap over the years. But if you've seen actual wood houses, its absurd how they last centuries while concrete weathers and turns to dust, and metal corrodes.
Further, wood stands up just as well as brick and concrete do in the face of tornados and earthquakes... In that they don't. They all collapse. the foundations are made with brick or concrete but its cheaper to rebuild the top if its wood then another material. You're not saving your house if it gets hit with a tornado.
Also concrete requires steel supports in order to be load bearing, which is again very expensive. If you don't put structural steel in the concrete, then you've created a death trap.
The cost argument is probably the more correct one, i don't think that the temperature fluctuation excuse holds water. In Eastern Europe we have some pretty extreme temperatures too, in a continental climate you can easily go from double digit negative temperatures in the winter to 30-40 in the summer. And the use of concrete and bricks and so on is still very widespread.
I didn’t say it was impossible, it’s not like if you use concrete it’s going to instantly vaporize and explode.
However it will require significantly more upkeep and repair, and will become dilapidated quickly without proper maintenance.
Just look what happened to all the khrushchevki after the Union fell. Many stop receiving support and fell apart quickly.
Also I don’t know what you mean by the reason not holding water. It’s not the end all be all, but it’s simply science. Concrete expands and contracts to much in the face of water and temperature to make a viable long term building material without constant upkeep.
Except Khrushchevki were never designed to be long-term solution. They were a stopgap measure and have in fact outlived their projected service time by decades
I agree, but that doesn’t dent the fact the millions still live in them to this day.
Does that support ComradeSalad's point? I.e. because if they were meant to last longer, they'd have been built differently?
Yes and no. They would have been built different, but not from wood. Don't have to go far for examples either: here's a house that was built to last in Stalin period. ComradeSalad does raise valid points regarding temperature jumps and the need for upkeep - but the latter is an issue with the economic mode, not the materials.
Besides, it's the XXI century. Surely we can build things with materials a tiny bit more advanced than basic concrete
What about stones? Stone houses last a long time, stone doesn't expand. Many houses in china also experience extreme temperature fluctuation and they build houses of stone too.
That’s all true, but stones are also much harder to transport, weigh more, are harder to acquire then wood, and are significantly more expensive then wood. That’s why masonry is much more common in Europe as opposed to the US as Europe has plenty of quarries in close proximity to all its population centers while the United States does not.
On the other hand, much of Europe has extremely limited wood so people turned to stone.
It’s just basic supply and demand, and what’s easier and cheaper to access.
That does indeed make sense
I bet there aren't many places there with such high fluctuations
You would be surprised. The United States is the size of a continent and just the North East and North Midwest United Stated are larger then all of Europe minus Russia.
Yep, but a house doesn't move from south to north to west, it's stationary so if a house is on the south, the temperatures in the north of the country are irrelevant
What? I don’t think you understood what I said. There are millions of homes in the United States that are subject to extreme temperature changes, the North East and North Midwest commonly go from -20C in the winter to 40C in the summer. The Great Lakes region like Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, Eire, and so on can easily go to -40C because of the water chill.
Plus the Central US is subject to the “desert” effect, where the daytime ground temperature is extremely high due to it being wide open plains, but then then nighttime temperature is extremely low because the ground does not hold the heat.
The Pacific Northwest can go from extremely hot summers to extremely cold and snowy winters. The climate of the US is extremely varied.
Ok, so I checked the 3 cities you mentioned on weatherspark.com and none of them comes close to that variation, Chicago for example typically goes from -6°C to 28°C, which is not extraordinary at all.
So as I said before there are probably not many places with so big variations. You maybe find some place, but as your own example showed, it's not the rule
Granted that’s the true air temperature, it doesn’t take into account wind chill, water chill, humidity, or the city heat island effect.
Also that’s the average typical temperature per month and averages are a bit poor at showing the typical daily temperatures and the fluctuations throughout even the day.
I mean, the facts doesn't hold much true
This also made me think of all concrete houses built in URSS on places that do get a high variation(Specially on the Stan countries). And we still can see today, houses built more than 70 years ago even with very few upkeeping
Not at all, having lived in such housing I can tell you for a fact they require very diligent maintenance. Especially in areas that have high temperature variation such as Moscow, Minsk, or St Petersburg.
Look even at Ukraine or poorer parts of the Baltic and Belarus. Or even Russia back in the 90’s, those buildings crumbled quickly and looked like bombed out wrecks in just a few years.
Concrete is a good building material, but you can’t just leave it without maintenance, especially for buildings.
I bet they have less maintenance than houses in the west, specially after the fall of USSR
https://gisgeography.com/us-temperature-map/
The maps don't bear out a lot of places with that sort of a temperature variety. Even they it did, -10⁰C and 40⁰C are just outside the norm for many steppe climates (an example off the top of my head), and there are whole cities of concrete in steppe climate regions.
Wood lasting centuries is even less credible, since wood can't last decades. Buildings can last in a ship of theseus sense, but the wood itself breaks down for all manner of reasons.
Literally the first result on Google. Also for the concrete, I never said you can’t use it; I just said it’s a less preferable material as it requires more maintenance.
I also never said the garbage plywood houses that they’re throwing up will last 100+ years. But I have seen many ancient wood frames in my life, and that is extremely common in the US.
That’ll be half a million dollars please