It’s probably a crazy quilt of things; I know in western Houston where I grew up, our soil was black clay- you could make stuff out of it like modeling clay. From what I understand, it tended to expand and contract with seasonal variations in rainfall, and that has a tendency to mess up foundations.
Here in my part of Dallas, we’re underlaid by chalky limestone (“Austin Chalk”), and it’s not that far down, so I doubt that builders are excited about excavating in limestone for basements either.
Here’s an article summarizing the reasons that basements are harder to find in southern states: it mainly relates to high water tables, shallow soils atop bedrock that’s hard to excavate, and/or soils that expand and contract in concert with seasonal dampness/dryness, putting strain on basement walls.
Another explanation I’ve seen is that in places like Texas, there’s plenty of land, making it less necessary to have a basement - you can have storage sheds instead (though it’s less practical to have a rec room or exercise facility in your shed).
Because some places that get good and hot also get seasonal monsoons and hurricanes. So the architecture is biased towards raised structures on wooden or concrete posts to prevent flooding, avoid ground moisture, and expose the windows to more wind for ventilation.
In places with lots of hills, there are often half-basements even if basements aren’t otherwise common. Building the house into the hill is pretty common in the American Southeast, in my experience.
That’s what I have in SE Michigan, we call them walk out basements. Half the house is on the side of a hill and other half is exposed in the “gully” with a door leading outside. Still nice and cool in the summer and a great man cave that walks out into a fire pit on the patio.
You see a lot of garages like this in the Southeast. You can park on the street and walk up the house to the front door, or pull around to the side of the house and into the garage. Steps in the garage take you up to the house.
When we built our So. California house in the early 2000’s, we wanted a basement mainly for the extra space for storage, workshop, etc. It added significantly to the cost mainly due to all the rebar required for earthquake standards (there’s a lot of it in the walls). We didn’t realize that, by accident, we had created a huge air conditioner for the living space above. We’ve never had installed A/C, and we don’t need it, as the temperature there never exceeds 75F even on the hottest 90F+ summer days. In the winter, even if the house has stood empty with no heating for a couple of weeks, the temperature never drops below 55F for the same reason. The basement temperature varies between 50F and 60F winter/summer.
This sounds like the classic raised ranch. I’ve lived in one of these in Tennessee as well as in Connecticut. In these houses, the basement is usually a half-basement on the same level as the garage.
I wonder if this true for California. Well, I know there are termites here. They’re ubiquitous. But I thought that most of the housing stock was built during the post war boom, and it was cheaper and faster to build on slabs. Those very old houses that still exist often have basements.
I love those Queenslander style houses. They really appeal to me. I like to catch the House Hunters International show when they’re in Australia, but they’re always looking at boring modern houses.
I was watching a documentary on the Chinese building a railway to Lhasa in Tibet. They showed why 50 years of efforts had failed. The top of the ground, above the permafrost, would melt and freeze. Anything built on it was quickly ruined. Buildings, railways…just wrecked.
You can see it in the documentary here (queued to the right time):
31 posts (and half of them about Texas) and no one had yet mentioned the basement of the Alamo?
Au contraire…
That’s how the whole discussion about basements started in the first place in the linked thread in the OP. 
The house I owned in SW Louisiana didn’t have a basement. It was next to a coulee, which overflowed during the frequent downpours and came up to our slab. It came up higher on the house across the coulee from us which was slightly downhill. I could just imagine how wet a basement would be.
As far as basements not being nice to stay in, we had a finished one in NJ which was great. So it depends on the basement.
Basements usually have sump pumps to remove water.
That said, as someone who grew up in the north with basements that had sump pumps (and a river in my backyard) they flooded plenty (either more water than they could handle or, more commonly, the power went out and the pumps stopped).
Tl;Dr: Basements didn’t flood as often as you might think but they still flooded.
Here in suburban Chicago, if a home doesn’t have a basement, it likely has at least a crawl space, in order to get the foundation below the freeze line. And, the region is prone to flooding during heavy rainstorms – even with the Deep Tunnel Project (which essentially gives the Chicago area a massive storm water sump), it’s very common for us to wind up with water in our basements when we get heavy rain in the summertime.
I know a lot of people here who have finished basements – usually rec rooms or family rooms, but some people have bathrooms and even “mother-in-law suites” in their basements. And, it’s not uncommon at all to have to tear out the ruined carpeting, etc., if your sump pump fails, or if the amount of rainwater overcomes what the sump pump can handle.
FWIW I grew up in suburban Chicago (Glenview, Highland Park, St. Charles and Chicago (which is not suburban)).
My sister and BiL just built a new home in the suburbs of Chicago with double sump pumps with battery backups. They spent 25 years dealing with flooded basements. They are done with that.
That depends on a lot of things - neither my basement nor the basement of the house I grew up in ever ended up with outside water. We’d get water on the basement floor because of something specific to our house ( broken washing machine hose, sewer backup, that sort of thing) but not sump pump was needed. However, we didn’t have a river nearby.
