"Well, I am not asking why individuals or developers build with it..I ask why it is allowed, at least in certain places"...mg

To respond to what you said in your original post regarding why they would still allow people to build with wood in light of the Kansas tornado (among other recent disasters), as someone from a small midwest town, I have a hunch that many of the homes in Greensburg, Kan., weren't new homes.

Many small towns in the midwest, especially ones located a great distance from hub cities (Garden City, Hutchinson, Wichita, Dodge City, Pratt in this case) generally aren't seeing a boom of new several hundred thousand dollar homes being built. They are older homes that have been there for years.

I don't know if Greensburg was necessarily like that, but that's my hunch.

Regardless of what they homes there were built with, when an F5 tornado with 205 mph winds blows through, even the sturdiest of structures will sustain some damage.