My old home still has it’s original shingle roof, It’s 80 years old. The probable in Florida isn’t so much with the tiles as it is with the quality underneath the tiles and sometimes the quality of the tiles. It’s like with bricks, a brick home from the 40’s is usually much better than a home made with modern bricks. The quality of the bricks, and the craftsmanship of the bricklayers and masons is so much superior to today’s work. And a forties roof truss is usually lumber that is true measurement, and a lot of times just rough sawed so that it thicker and usually better quality timber than today’s wood. A roof built in Florida during a building boom period is usually not as good because of materials and quality (gotta get 3 more roofs done today). So it isn’t just that it’s a tile roof, it’s the thickness of the tiles, quality of mounting, and underlying support, There are tile roofs in Tampa that have been there since the Spanish American War.
From the late 1800’s to about 1929 houses in the central US were framed with boards made from old-growth trees floated down the Mississippi from Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Friends who work on these old houses say cutting that wood is difficult and puts a load on their circular saws.
They told me new homes the saw zips right through.
The old-style wood simply does not exist anymore. Maybe the time for steel framing has come...you see steel homes all through the Arkansas delta because insects there are terrible. They eat up wood (and people too).