Comment by UniverseHacker 15 hours ago
Unreinforced masonry is illegal in most of California and extremely dangerous- every brick becomes a projectile in an earthquake.
Despite the news coverage, fires are extremely rare but nearly every home in these areas is guaranteed to face multiple massive earthquakes that would bring down a brick building.
I don’t know but do they have ~7.9 earthquakes like California? I’ll bet they were not multi story homes with vaulted ceilings, giant glass windows with tons of natural light, and efficient insulation?
Wood is extremely cheap, and extremely earthquake resistant… it is an appropriate material for the area despite a slightly higher fire risk.
They have had up to ~9.0Mw earthquakes in their history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Peru
You can also look at some states like Chiapas in Mexico. There are daily earthquakes in Tuxla. Last 8.2 was in 2017 in Tapachula. They typically live in small building made of mud bricks and stones. https://earthquakelist.org/mexico/chiapas/#all-latest-earthq...
In practice, it is probably impossible to innovate on housing materials in California- I doubt you could get a permit or insurance, which is a shame.
Plus, I and most people wouldn't personally want to buy a any type of stone or brick house- it would take a lot of evidence to convince me it was earthquake safe, and I'm not sure how one could produce such evidence. Resale value and demand would be very low for something unusual.
Wood houses in practice aren't a big problem. There is something like a 3% chance per century of a wood house burning down in California, and almost all of those are centered on specific locations that are known to be very high risk and can be avoided if desired.
In most cases you would escape safely and be covered by insurance (neither of which would be the case with a stone house in an earthquake). In California almost everyone has fire insurance, almost nobody can get earthquake insurance. Probably if a stone house was in a large fire, it would still be burned to bare walls and still be as unlivable and expensive to rebuild.
In cusco basin in Peru spanish colons realized their brick made building were falling down at every earthquake. They also realized incas building made of thin walls built on top of large stones that can move relative to each others during an earthquake were resisting much better. They then decided to reuse the foundations of incas buildings and put their brick build constructions on top of it to have earthquake resistant building.
Earthquake resistant constructions made of stones have been known for centuries by the incas and probably other civilizations without having building entirely made of wood, why can't californians?