As you can see from the photo above, even the most expensive houses around here (i.e. suburbia) are built not of stone, concrete or brick, but what one person I spoke to described as "8-foot stick". This wooden superstructure is covered in insulation - typically Tyvek - and then some sort of thin cladding. The fancier abodes get a faux-Victorian brick facade, but more often than not (our house included) the outside of the house is clad in amazingly flimsy plastic panelling that disintegrates the moment you come close. Interior walls are made of plasterboard. In most instances, the roof is just strips of felt stapled to wooden boards.
Not surprisingly therefore, these houses don't stand up to any hurricanes that come huffing and puffing by, which is why all houses have a "tornado room"; a typically subterranean and/or brick-walled room that will resist the ravages of Mother Nature and to which you can retreat if you don't fancy dropping, covering and holding onto table legs as your house of cards collapses around you.
All this leaves me to wonder why houses are built so rudimentarily. Is it purely a question of cost? Or could it be that people don't bother investing in sturdier accommodation because they move around so often (our house is just six years old and we're already the third occupants)?
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