> The trouble is, brick isn't earthquake resistant. Not without steel reinforcement.

It's just a matter of throwing a couple hundreds $ of metal and cement every few rows of bricks, like this: https://www.pointp.fr/asset/27/07/AST212707-XL.jpg when you see how much american spend on houses it's a drop in the ocean.

FYI a two storey 10x10m house will run you less than 10k euros in bricks for the external walls, and that's with 30cm wide honeycomb bricks which probably provide enough thermal insulation as is for LA. Add 10k of rockwool insulation and you're good to go for most places.

You use wood for simple reasons: it's widely available, that's the only thing your workers are trained on, it's cheaper so builders make more money, it's faster and allow crazier design (mcmansions). Same thing for asphalt shingles, nobody uses that, it needs constant replacement, but it's cheaper, easier/faster to install.

In europe we mostly build rectangles with simple two pitch roofs, ceramic tiles that last 50+ years, most of them are made of bricks, even in seismically active countries like Italy.

Europe: https://www.philomag.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_...

US: https://www.reviewjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/950...

And skill, likely in low supply, and labor. I'm sure some in the Pacific Palisades could afford this no problem, but many in altadena inherited their homes and their homes were the majority of their net worth.

Admittedly not very knowledgeable about this stuff but I feel like a lot of these types of comments are greatly trivializing this problem