New Houses: How Many Are Built with Wood?

The Forest Service has completed the first of a series of studies on the use of wood in residential construction. Approximately 170,000 new single-family detached houses inspected by the FHA in 1959 were classified according to type of foundation and type of exterior wall construction; these factors were used to determine the distribution of house construction types in each of seven geographic regions. Seven out of ten houses represented by the sample were of wood frame construction, but this ratio varied from two out of ten for the Gulf States, to nearly ten out of ten for the Lake States and South Atlantic regions. One house out of five used lumber, plywood, fiberboard, or wood shake or shingle siding, but in the Northwest, Central States, and Lake States regions more than one-third of the houses used these siding materials, while in the Southwest, South Atlantic and Gulf States, only 5 percent of the siding was wood. In five out of seven regions most of the new houses had a basement or crawl space and a floor support system made largely of wood. In the Southwest and Gulf States, however, most houses were built on concrete slabs. Nationwide, four out of every ten houses in the sample were built on concrete slabs. Tables show percentages for the use of different types of exterior wall constructions and foundations in the seven geographic regions.

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