As flames chewed through hundreds of thousands of board feet of exposed lumber and plywood in a spectacular fire at an under-construction apartment building in downtown Raleigh Thursday night, a question swirled like smoke. Why build an apartment out of wood?
It may seem counterintuitive to see a full-scale return in 2017 to the same building materials colonists hewed from the forests when they first landed in the New World. But all over Raleigh, and especially downtown, along Hillsborough Street and around Cameron Village, wood-frame apartment buildings have proliferated in the post-recession housing-market rebirth because they’re an economical way to build highly demanded high-density housing.