That attitude goes back at least to Thomas Jefferson. Here's a letter he wrote in 1791:

A country whose buildings are of wood, can never increase in its improvements to any considerable degree. There duration is highly estimated at 50 years. Every half century then our country becomes a tablua rasa, whereon we have to set out anew, as in the first moment of seating it. Whereas when buildings are of durable materials, every new edifice is an actual and permanent acquisition to the state, adding to is value as well as to its ornament.

Any argument that wooden houses last 100+ years is ignoring survivorship bias :) But even granting that, 100 years is not a very long time - just over one lifetime. If your parents lived in a wooden house, your children will need to build a new one.

I agree with you that 100 years is not very long - I chose that number because a lot of communities in America aren't a lot older than that. The idea of a suburb didn't really catch on until after WWII, so we don't really have much data on those beyond 60 years. And even beyond that, a lot of areas in the midwest/west weren't very settled until around the turn of the century, so permanent structures from before then are not common.

It doesn't have to be simultaneous. If buildings last about 50 years, then in 50 years you're going to have completely different set of buildings. You'll have no influences to draw on from 50+ years ago.

It's from "Notes on the State of Virginia" http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JEFFERSON/ch15.html which was actually a book, a collection of essays published by Jefferson.

if it's not simultaneous, how does the country ever become a tablua [sic] rasa (a blank slate)?

I actually like European houses because they have a sense of being of a longer timespan than I am, it reminds me that I'm transient in a much slower changing world.

Seeing the cities change around me faster than I can absorb those changes always weirds me out. In Europe you have that too in areas where there is a lot of construction but it only gets to me with places that I know well. I remember almost driving into a tree when I rounded a corner into Amsterdam one fine weekday morning and saw a - new to me - very large building that had been built during my stay in Canada. Of course for people that had seen it built it arrived very slowly but for me it might as well have popped out of the ground.

So you can imagine what I feel when I'm in North America.

That's an interesting viewpoint that I hadn't really considered before.

Of course, the US as a whole just isn't that old compared to most of Europe. So it's hard for us to have buildings that are 300 or 500 years old - because no one was here that long ago. Not saying our current buildings won't last that long, we just don't know yet. And the idea that they are just going to crumble to the ground one day because they are made of wood seems a bit misguided to me.

Indeed. My house is ~150 years old and made of wood, much of it original. Even large sections of the hardwoods are believed to be original or relatively close to it. Certainly the newest section of hardwood predates the addition of radiator based heat (based on scorch marks from a wood burning stove)

In my neighborhood, the #1 reason for similarly aged wooden houses to be torn down is simply because developers want to build multi-level, multi-unit condo buildings.

Just a guess, but our country was founded by Masons and perhaps that leads to a bias for ... other materials.

It's interesting that a lot of new homes are stick built but with brick fascia, where bricks are available.