One reason for this, believe it or not, is slavery. One very under-appreciated aspect of cotton plantations is that cotton (in the days before artificial fertilizers) very quickly exhausted the soil of the American South, leaving behind land that was mostly only suitable for growing pine trees. This left pine wood as a cheap and plentiful resource for building houses. Southern US pine is now so plentiful that it's even the source of most of the chopsticks in China.

[–] miked@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Bricks cannot be put at ground level. They will deteriorate.

if it it's only on the front are they even using full bricks or just brick face?

[–] jqubed@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

I think on a residential exterior I’ve usually seen full bricks, but they’re only a facade nowadays, not structural, so it’s only one deep and then normal wood framing and plywood behind the brick. I have seen at least once on a house show where they just made lines in stucco and painted it to look like brick, and brick face tiles on the interior.