How do you have sex in that? How do your teenagers have sex in that? Is that what you wanted or merely what you put up with because you don't know that it could be done any better?
Also: open plan kitchen. You can't cook in there; if you do everything smells of cooking and it covered with oil mist in short order. You can't remodel, because you house is your biggest tax-free leveraged savings vehicle and Americans are surprisingly conformist; your remodel just won't sell.
I like my open plan kitchen because I can be cooking, and supervising my young kid playing in the living room at the same time. Or, if guests are over, I can be cooking dinner and still be part of the conversation.
I don't generally put up with it, but who am I to dictate everyone else's standards for their own living?
> Also: open plan kitchen. You can't cook in there; if you do everything smells of cooking and it covered with oil mist in short order
Open plan kitchens are fine if you have a proper range hood, but yeah, some people undersize their range hoods... but also lots of people don't cook much.
> Even poor people don't build houses from plywood. But in America it seems that everyone, poor and rich builds extremely fragile houses.
It isn't generally just plywood, that would be a very unusual house.
As for your question of cost, with brick exterior walls, the marginal cost of interior volume decreases with size, so the question of an "awesome house" kinda changes. What people expect to be paid for labour is also higher.
Brick is not a panacea, when it comes to building houses. It is an efficient thermal conductor, so insulation is more difficult, the way you have to fasten the interior of the house to it causes thermal bridging. Common ways of constructing brick buildings can cause condensation on the inside in cold winters, which can cause damage and harm air quality.
There are two and three hundred year old timber homes. It is quite doable if you have large enough overhangs, and a durable roof.
Also keep in mind Russia and Kazakhstan have a completely different climate to most of North America.
Then on top of all of this, a lot of North Americans think of houses very differently. There are people who are building for a lifetime and a legacy, but most are content to have a comfortable sizeable dwelling which isn't going to collapse. It's fine to build a mediocre timber home, if it means that people get more or less what they wanted. As somebody who appreciates fine quality housing, I'd like it another way, but it seems that my fellow North Americans have something else in mind, and that's their business.