Brick houses are disappearing from America’s new construction: ‘Nobody got paid for how long a house would last’
“They needed shelter urgently, and a carpentry team got the job done faster than a masonry team ever would have.” Brick construction requires skilled workers to lay individual bricks, one at a time.
Key points
- “After World War II the country needed homes that were more affordable and could be built in large batches, and a framing crew can close in a house way quicker and cheaper than a masonry crew can lay up solid walls.” Brick veneer let builders keep the familiar look of masonry without relying on it to hold up the house.
- Brick or brick veneer covered just 16.8% of new single-family homes started in 2025, down from almost a quarter in 2012, according to a National Association of Home Builders analysis of Census data.
- Between 1947 and 1951, the company built 17,447 houses in Levittown on Long Island, at times finishing 10 to 12 homes a day.
Yet the brick house, the kind built to stand for a century, has nearly vanished from new construction.
Not “will this last a lifetime?” Just “will it last the mortgage?” “We didn’t decide to build houses that just outlast the mortgage.
Additional details
- The change reflects a postwar housing boom, a shrinking skilled-labor pool, rising construction costs, and a preference for homes that could be built quickly and cheaply.
- Skilled brick masons are not equally available across the country, he said, and regional differences in the workforce influence which materials builders choose.
- The pressure hasn’t eased: the construction industry will need an estimated 456,000 new workers in 2027, according to the Associated Builders and Contractors.
- “That figure refers to brick veneer used as exterior cladding over wood frame construction.
- They’re wood-frame houses with a layer of brick veneer attached to the outside.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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