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buildings != homes/dwellings.
Europes Here is America's.

Note that most of Europe's construction is from the 70s on (sweden is a HUGE exception). br America's is about what I would expect. The rust belt has homes that are 45-65 years old, while the south east and west is generally under 30.

The average is about $1600aud per year which is about $1200usd per year or $100 per month: https://www.canstarblue.com.au...
The average in the USA is also about $100 per month: http://eyeonhousing.org/2015/0...

As far as my outsider's knowledge goes, many Americans choose to build 'cheap and lightly' with resulting lifetimes of less than 20 years.

Your "outsider's knowledge" is wrong, unsurprisingly.
See the-age-of-the-housing-stock-by-state to get some real information. And, if you read the article, you'll see that the states with lower median housing age are those with higher growth (i.e. building a lot of new homes because the population is growing in those areas - not because they're replacing existing homes).

The only places I've seen homes/apartments actually being ripped down and replaced is where the location is more valuable then the existing building and the replacement is larger - this is mainly done in wealthy suburbs where smaller houses are being replaced with much larger ones (and then the small homes were usually built in the 1950's or 60's).

$160k sounds like a pretty low price for builting a house. In 2013 the average construction costs for a new home in the USA seemed to be just shy of $250k

http://eyeonhousing.org/2014/0...

It looks like materials cost about half of this ($146k) according to http://www.fixr.com/costs/buil... so even if you did everything yourself, building a typical house for $160k seems like a bargain.

Good god. I don't need a 2500 sqft mansion, and $125 per is including total contracted out. I'd do most of the work myself so I can get a house better than contractor grade for at least half that. Really the only thing I'd need to contract out would be the foundation and brickwork if I wanted brick.

Yeah, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but for $160,000.00 I could get way more than a tad over an acre and build nice a house.

$160k sounds like a pretty low price for builting a house. In 2013 the average construction costs for a new home in the USA seemed to be just shy of $250k

http://eyeonhousing.org/2014/0...

It looks like materials cost about half of this ($146k) according to http://www.fixr.com/costs/buil... so even if you did everything yourself, building a typical house for $160k seems like a bargain.

Actually, the average person owns their home for 13 years. So the analogy is correct - the average person would move before the patents expire.

Average SF home is over 2,000 sq. ft. Assume a roof size, conservatively, of 1,000 sq. ft.

Most new housing in SF is not single family -- when I lived in SF, my share of roof for my 1000 sq ft apartment was around 100 sq feet.

10 inches of rain on 1,000 sq. ft. is around 6,000 gallons available per household per year.

Even if I could capture 6000 gallons of water, where would I find a place to store a 10 x 10 x 8 foot container that weighs 24 tons?

You could provide for 12% of residential water needs just by people not sending their roof water to the sewer system.

Why shift billions of dollars of costs to consumers to build home water capture and treatment systems when cutting just 3% of agricultural usage would free up the same amount of water? You know what's easier than capturing residential roof runoff? Not planting water-heavy crops in the desert and shipping them overseas.

Imagine if we reused the water that lands on roadways...172,000 miles of highway, average width of ~10 feet...68 billion gallons of water wasted each year...almost what the entire state uses in a year.

I don't think you understand just how much water california uses -- residential use along is 6 - 8 million acre feet, 68B gallons is only around 200,000 acre feet. It would cost billions to build 172,000 miles of highway water reclamation and treatment plants.

Average SF home is over 2,000 sq. ft. Assume a roof size, conservatively, of 1,000 sq. ft.

10 inches of rain on 1,000 sq. ft. is around 6,000 gallons available per household per year.

Coastal usage per person is around 145 gallons per day.

You could provide for 12% of residential water needs just by people not sending their roof water to the sewer system.

Imagine if we reused the water that lands on roadways...172,000 miles of highway, average width of ~10 feet...68 billion gallons of water wasted each year...almost what the entire state uses in a year.