Besides wood, what is the next best thing for a permanent shelter?

Heavy canvas and or hides that can be sewed together.

 

Anything you can get ya hands on..little bit of creativity

 

Concrete ain't bad. On the farm I grew up on grandad had done some experiments with concrete, like a chicken coop and some stuff. You can use old bicycles or whatever scrap metal for rubar.
Concrete is about as permenent at it gets.
Stone shelters fixed with clay is the choice for alot of people also.

 

A friend built his house with survival in mind. It is cinder block walls with cement poured into the holes. It is two story and he surrounded the bottom with a layer of old telephone poles. The roof is flat with a 4" cinder block wall all the way around and a gazebo like thing in the middle. Other than the door the ground floor only has narrow 12" wide windows that are more gun ports than windows. It is heated with wood and can go off line easily. It is backed up into a huge forest that is owned by a lumber company so he will never have neighbors. The land has been in his family for a long time and he has a special agreement with the lumber company that if he sells they get the right to match any offer her gets. In exchange for this he has hunting rights on their 25,000 acres. Mike is like me and bugged out 30 or so years ago into a very similar area near a small redneck town.

 

If you can use whatever you want and have access to...
cinderblocks
I've seen homes made from newspapers, as well as bales of hay and covered in concrete; logs cut into cylindrical slices and held together with concrete like they are stones.
Stone homes with thick walls stay cooler in the summer, from what I've seen and felt.
Earth homes
Dome homes made from concrete are supposedly nearly tornado proof.

 

depends where a person is, sod or snow has been used, adobe, rammed earth. Maybe a bunch of old car hoods.

 

I toured a property in Central Texas on a hillside where a prepper was building geodesic domes into the hillside using steel rebar on a pattern on the ground for two different triangles and wiring them together to create the dome shape in rebar then covering with chicken wire then pouring concrete over to form the dome. Once poured he would then cover the whole dome with earth. He had built at least 8 domes and connected them all with tunnels made the same way. He was in process of building more. He said the only real drawback he had encountered was the need to remove the moisture from the air in the domes due to human breath. Air Conditioning was a must have. It seemed fairly easy to build and pretty affordable. They built the domes by hand and even mixed and spread the cement by hand.

 

I'd be a little concerned about underground homes in some areas since there is some shifting that occurs and it could crack it. Some places in Texas are like that and watering the soil, they say, helps prevent shifting and cracking of a foundation.
Rammed earth, yes, @randyt , that's the other thing. Some good videos for it.

 

Another vote for reinforced concrete, like Insulated Concrete Forms. ICF is the ultimate prepper home IMO, or at least at middle-class home costs. Superior in nearly every way to stick or brick homes; nearly air tight, greater insulation rating/energy efficiency for use off-grid or grid-down, fire/flood/wind resistant, much greater ballistic protection, higher radiation protection factor, rodent proof and insect resistant, and better sound proofing. For the OPSEC-minded, once the siding is on there's no external evidence that the house is concrete. Most people that enter mine don't even realize it's ICF, the only noticeable difference being the width of the walls (over 13" thick, 8 of which is concrete) when walking through the entry doors and the depth of the window sills.

 

Right, that's why to build your permanent shelter now. Fires, tornadoes, flash floods, hurricanes, home invasions, terrorist attacks, etc don't provide much notice. The concrete also needs time to cure before it reaches its full strength, for ICF with commercial strength concrete it can cure for years inside the forms.

Here's a subdivision where the S really HTF (fire), only the three ICF homes survived.

 

My vote is for earth sheltered reinforced concrete, it's an expensive way to build but if you do it right you'll never have to worry about maintenance or heating costs ever again.

 

The list of things that you can use to build a house is almost endless. Bales of straw that you then cover with stucco, plastic bottles, Aluminum cans, people made sod houses for centuries, straw thach, adobe mud bricks, At one time Hienekenmade their beer bottles so you could build eco friendly places with them,

https://laughingsquid.com/heineken-wobo-a-beer-bottle-brick-for-building-eco-homes/



Like I said, the list is endless...