If the house outlives its owner, it's done its job.
This mentality is why we can't have nice things — literally. We used to build things to last. They were so good and lasted so long that we would actually upgrade them. Now we build things to be as cheap as possible. They are so flimsy and disintegrate so quickly that we won't pay a dime more for them, either.
Now I'll grant you, it doesn't do you any good to build a home out of rough 2x6 when you site it on a flood plain, and many of our communities are in retarded locations. From that standpoint, it makes sense to build disposable homes. But in other countries, people are living in homes which have stood for hundreds of years, and they're not stick shit shacks. If they are timber structures, they're built in a way that we don't really build any more. We call it overbuilding, but that's arrogant nonsense.