When I lived in upstate New York, the houses were a mixture; some brick, more wood or stone.
I own a house in Tennessee, built in the early '80’s; wood frame with brick facade. (One full course of brick, but no wider.)
My current house is in Virginia, built in the early 60’s is also wood frame with brick facade on the ground floor; the second floor has siding over the brick. (No, I have no idea why whoever did that thought it was a good idea.)
I may be using the term brick facade incorrectly, but it seems to me that the wood frame is what is holding up the house, and the brick is keeping the elements off of the wood frame.
I think that the official name for this brick façade is a* curtain wall* this means that the bricks have no structural role. Only that is there there to protect the wood and look pretty.
You got that right. A lot of the local planning and building effort in my county (Lee) has been spent enforcing this look. It’s called “Mediterranean” and yes, it gets monotonous pretty quick. People have found out that those big, red roof tiles make great projectiles in high wind.
So to answer the OP, southwest Florida is not made of brick, despite my wishes.
A huge difference from those UK homes, BTW, is the roofing - tile roofs are relatively rare here and usually limited to Spanish-style homes and buildings in the Southwest and Florida. In my experience traveling around the country and living in South Carolina and Georgia, asphalt shingles are by far the most common roofing material. There is some tile and some wooden shake, and every so often metal tries to make a break into residential homes, but on the whole roofs seem overwhelmingly likely to be asphalt.
Brick is a great building material in areas like the Northeast which have hot summers and cold winters. In the summer, a brick house surrounded by trees stays much cooler. (We live in one and barely had to run the air conditioner at all this summer.) In the winter, brick holds in heat pretty well, too.
