I've been to wooden houses here in Sweden that are 200 years old. If properly maintained the lifespan can be quite long.

As writing this in a 140y old wooden house in a neighbourhood of alikes (some of them even several stories high, consisting of many apartments), I would say that lifespan of 200+ years can be reached easily, as long the foundation and roof are checked regularly and maintained properly. Of course the modern wooden element engineering and it's lifespan is a mystery.

Wooden houses - if maintained properly - can last very long indeed.

The problem nowadays is that we don't maintain stuff. It's sexier to rebuild it (at a much greater expense in resources). I don't see this changing unless we're getting too poor (not just in money, also in resources) to rebuild and have to repair.

A concrete building has a lifespan of about 50 years. Even so, most people wouldn't want to live in a 30 or 40-year old building anyway.

This is very dependent on location. There are places where, eg, the buildings from the 60s are rather well built, but the later buildings are terrible. It's not the age that matters. My previous apartment was brand new building, but cheaply built to cash in on certain developments nearby (new transport links, new faculty building at the university). I doubt it will still be there in twenty years. My current building is much older but much nicer to live in (thicker walls, better ventilation, no creaks and whistles when the wind blows the wrong way). I think it must be 40 years old or more.

In The Netherlands, anything post-WWII up to the 1980s is typically of very low quality. We had to quickly rebuild the country. And it was the start of prefab concrete, which had some teething issues. In the 1980s we had the Bouwbesluit, a set of rules for building residential homes. Everything built since the Bouwbesluit is of high quality and can usually be purchased without worry. Those homes are typically also well insulated.

Looking at pre-war the 1930s were great. Opulent homes with a high degree of finishing, including stained glass, beautiful mouldings, lots of wood finishing, en-suite doors.

I think it's quite normal to live in a 100+ year old building in a European city center. Though they're usually made from brick and not concrete.

And do people who have built their own house usually demolish it and move on after just 30-40 years? That's when you've just paid off your mortgage, heh.

At my parents' house, they just replaced the roof, which was well over 30 years old. The house itself is over 100 years old and completely fine to live in.

In Europe, people often pay extra to live in buildings which are several hundred years old.

I live in such a building. Only the facade is hundreds of years old, the rest has been completely redone multiple times over its lifetime. The entire building gets stripped, including the floors. New floors are placed, then the walls, then the interior walls. Even the foundation was completely replaced once.

You mean they pay to live in that 1 out of 100 buildings of that age that is still standing and on which multiple extensive renovations have been conducted.

Anything can last forever if you maintain it. At some point it's really a rebuild with nothing of the original structure, but that's debating semantics. The problem is the effort/cost to do so. Concrete and steel structures are maintenance free for more than their architecture remains acceptable by ever changing standards of living. Wood, even laminated, requires very frequent maintenance. And not just for aesthetics and insulation but for the structural integrity to remain intact.

I inherited my grandfather's axe, but I had to replace the head once and the handle twice.