There are almost no 100 year old brick buildings in San Francisco. Why? Because there was a big goddamn earthquake in 1906, and unreinforced masonry (which is to say, functionally almost all of it) deals badly with earthquakes in general. It deals especially badly with them when they are built on landfill.
There are also lots of mentions of survivorship bias, which is extremely relevant here.
Now that said, I find modern construction to be badly done in general, because it is almost all of it erected as cheaply as possible—and as cheaply as possible as measured by the shortest possible term metric. There is good stuff done still, and it is arguably cheaper over the ten year run or longer, but that's not what people buy and so it's not what the developers make. I'd like to claim this is shortsightedness but I can't shake the feeling that it's because real wages have been stagnant or sometimes declining since around 1972. There just isn't the money to spend.
N.B.: there are a lot of reasons why modern lumber seems like so much crap. About 95% of it is because folks are unwilling to pay for good lumber, as described above. Quality lumber, even quality construction lumber exists, but it's significantly more expensive than #2 common. Of the remainder, it's worth remembering that modern 2x4s are tend to be farmed in sustainable fashion using fast growth species like Douglas fir or Southern yellow pine. The stuff we were building with in the 30s and 40s? Quite a lot of that came from old growth forests, now irrevocably gone.
There are also lots of mentions of survivorship bias, which is extremely relevant here.
Now that said, I find modern construction to be badly done in general, because it is almost all of it erected as cheaply as possible—and as cheaply as possible as measured by the shortest possible term metric. There is good stuff done still, and it is arguably cheaper over the ten year run or longer, but that's not what people buy and so it's not what the developers make. I'd like to claim this is shortsightedness but I can't shake the feeling that it's because real wages have been stagnant or sometimes declining since around 1972. There just isn't the money to spend.
N.B.: there are a lot of reasons why modern lumber seems like so much crap. About 95% of it is because folks are unwilling to pay for good lumber, as described above. Quality lumber, even quality construction lumber exists, but it's significantly more expensive than #2 common. Of the remainder, it's worth remembering that modern 2x4s are tend to be farmed in sustainable fashion using fast growth species like Douglas fir or Southern yellow pine. The stuff we were building with in the 30s and 40s? Quite a lot of that came from old growth forests, now irrevocably gone.