This holds true for even further back than 1980. Victorian style houses, the ones built with brick (not just brick veneer, but actual brick walls throughout, even inside) are even better than the 1980 houses.
They do have other issues of course (plumbing, wiring etc), but construction quality was better before WW2. At some point the US switched to wood from brick and basically that was that.
There are good things about wood, but there's also a point to the three-little-pigs story about wooden houses vs brick houses.
This holds true for even further back than 1980. Victorian style houses, the ones built with brick (not just brick veneer, but actual brick walls throughout, even inside) are even better than the 1980 houses.
They do have other issues of course (plumbing, wiring etc), but construction quality was better before WW2. At some point the US switched to wood from brick and basically that was that.
There are good things about wood, but there's also a point to the three-little-pigs story about wooden houses vs brick houses.
And fire is a thing as well.