Comment by nradov
Wood is incredibly cheap in North America. We're not cutting down forests for it, either. Much of the wood used for residential construction is milled from trees grown specifically for that purpose.
Wood is incredibly cheap in North America. We're not cutting down forests for it, either. Much of the wood used for residential construction is milled from trees grown specifically for that purpose.
> We're not cutting down forests for it, either.
The largest share of the illegal wood extracted from Brazil goes to the US.
Most illegal wood is not hardwood.
What is not to say that most of the wood in the US is illegal. It's probably a small share. But some of your houses do pretty much chop forests down. (And your government does help fight that, but it's hard to completely stop it.)
Lumber is quite a bit lower quality than it used to be, because we're no longer using old-growth timber. Less dense wood burns faster, as does the laminated strand board that long ago replaced plywood (unless you're really fancy) (and toxic fire retardant treatments be damned).
The low cost of lumber is one of many things in America that don't make sense economically, but that persist because of momentum, with each generation receiving an inferior facsimile of what the previous ones knew. See also: car-centric policy (from infrastructure to gas prices) and retirement planning (pensions to IRAs to nothing).