Timber hunger in the American Housing Sector

Mike Roddy

Americans consume 23% of the world’s wood products, with 4% of global population. This is fueled by subsidized timber, entrenched in a nexus of the lumber, construction, and insurance industries

Americans’ habit of building houses with lumber is a 19th century relic, a method rarely used in the rest of the world. Australia and Hawaii have shifted away from wood framing, due to fire and termite issues. Our houses last an average of 60 years. Houses in Asia, Europe, and South America are designed to last for centuries, since they feature concrete, steel, and masonry.  American houses are cheap, but are they really?

Lumber framing is no bargain for those who live in forested areas, either. Resource states such as Oregon, Idaho, and Alabama lag neighboring states’ incomes. Logging towns are losing population due to automation and depletion of local forests.

Logging is the most dangerous job in America, killing and injuring more people per capita than more notorious jobs like coal mining and high rise construction work. Laid off and limping loggers in small towns in Oregon are told to blame environmentalists for their problems.

Solutions include light steel framing, masonry, or reinforced concrete. Wood is cheaper because it is highly subsidized in our country: lumber costs more almost everywhere in the world than it does here.  In fact, very few countries build their houses with lumber, because they know that it is a flimsy way to build.

America is in decline, as our democracy is now controlled by entrenched corporate interests. There is no better example of this than our timber industry.

They are good at PR, though- Mark Hatfield, the Oregon Senator who always fought for the loggers, saved a tiny forest near Corvallis from the chainsaws when he retired. Henry Merlo, former Lousiana Pacific CEO, destroyed great forests in Northwest California and said about the trees “I want ‘em all!”. There is now a Henry Merlo Redwood Grove, a tiny area set aside to assuage his guilt. The other 95% of our great coastal redwoods have been cut down.

It’s not Little House on the Prairie anymore, folks (though the pioneers switched to sod after the local Indians kept torching their log houses).  The following chapter will try to address the mystery of our habit of building houses with ancient technology.

Why do we still build houses out of lumber?

It’s cheaper. An eight foot two by four costs $3 in the United States, though it’s more expensive in other parts of the world. We subsidize wood, by providing tax writeoffs for chemical treatments and land tax depreciation after clearcuts.

USA ranks #47 in the world in fire safety, measured as deaths per capita, but somehow have decided to provide free fire departments when lumber houses burn down, and, worst of all, allow no insurance premium breaks for inert materials like steel, concrete, or masonry when there is a house fire. This absurd situation is even enshrined in state laws, including in California.

Framing is about 18% of a house hard construction budget. Steel adds about 20% to that figure, meaning about a 3.6% cost increase compared to wood. Builders are rarely motivated to use it, because the house looks the same, and long term quality or safety are rarely important to their buyers, who would rather pay less.

After the Camp Fire, builders and refugees who wanted to use noncombustible materials were told by the insurance companies and local fire departments to focus on “defensible space”, closing eaves, and everything except reducing the 20 tons of lumber that goes into an American house.

The Example of the Town of Paradise in Northern California

In Paradise, as in Oakland, Malibu, and Santa Rosa, wildfires easily found ways to ignite the lumber in the walls, either through embers or radiant heat. Paradise City Council brought in an architectural firm from Pennsylvania to design the new town. His drawings were all of wood framed houses. When I confronted him at  the meeting, he could only tremble.

Earlier, a PG&E spokesman told City Council members and locals in the audience that Sierra Pacific, a big logging firm from California, would remove the trees to eliminate fire dangers. Many of those trees were 3 feet in diameter, old growth remnants from many years ago. They survived the Camp Fire, as shown in the photograph. Sierra Pacific took them to their mill, since the wood was in fine condition, and added to Roy Emmerson’s $4 billion logging fortune. They left behind the small hardwoods and pine saplings, since there was no money in them.

House fires and insurance

The timber industry is embedded with American insurance firms, since house fire insurance premiums are a major cash cow for them. If the rate of house fires goes up in a given year, underwriters raise the rates. Camp Fire victims in Butte County saw their fire insurance premiums triple for modest sized houses, from around $700 a year to $2000 and up. Rates are calculated based on zip code, proximity to Fire Departments, and square footage. Whether the houses are built with lumber or noncombustible materials is of no interest, and they say “not enough data” for steel framed houses. This latter claim is absurd, since at least 500,000 houses have been framed with steel in the United States, about 20% of those in California. Those companies want to insure the concrete or steel houses at premium rates that are very profitable for them, and state law protects them. This perpetuates dangerous wood framing in the WUI, and will cause more people to burn to death. In other words, go ahead and rebuild with lumber, and if your house burns down in a few decades the insurance company will have already recovered their premiums with interest. 

By contrast, our family owns a large apartment in Paris, 2 bedrooms, in the trendy 11th Arrondissement. The insurance premium is 560 euros a year, and most of that amount is for water damage, liability, and theft. It’s built with reinforced concrete, steel window frames, and steel roofs.

Not gonna burn unless there’s a contents fire, where we would lose some furniture and clothing.

Current policies are a classic example of America becoming a dysfunctional country, with tax breaks for the wealthy, massive militaries and fire departments, and plenty of churn for homebuilders and manufacturers of vanity products.

Our GDP and per capita income are mirages. Money is going down the toilet and slurped up by politicians, Wall Street, insurance companies, and military contractors.  In Denmark, a McDonald’s worker makes $22 an hour, the food is fresh, and their houses rarely catch fire. We used to be a better country, and avoiding construction of death traps in forests is a good place to start.

The future of Paradise

It’s up in the air at present. 14,000 houses burned down, but only a few dozen have been rebuilt. Permits are in process for a few hundred more, but many residents I’ve spoken to are afraid to move back to a dangerous fire area. They are tired of government spokesmen telling them that everything is going to be OK. Locals can’t even buy cheap insurance from overseas. Local firms who want to charge them $2000 a year say that if they self insure or get a policy from overseas for noncombustible construction that they will not be able to get a mortgage. The mayor even asked me at a meeting, “How do we know that steel houses won’t also burn?”. City Council members were embedded with timber and construction interests.

The town might not survive, which would be a tragedy. The location is beautiful and peaceful, and most residents are honest, hardworking religious folks.  They trusted their leaders, builders, insurance companies, and architects, but now are leery of the next fire, since nothing has been done to prevent it. A few miles away is a town called Concow, which burned down repeatedly, and has seen its population go from several thousand to a few dozen scattered homes. Some Paradise residents even moved to Las Vegas or Los Angeles, providing a new set of nightmares. They deserve better.

The featured photo is of some of the hundreds of thousands of logs that came out of the healthy trees shown earlier- note that the big trees were fine, but the lumber in the houses, along with the contents, burned to a crisp.