Concrete high-rises are ubiquitous in the large cities of many countries outside of North America. Places like Brazil, Hong Kong, Eastern Europe, and Japan make extensive use of these buildings. However it seems like the concrete tower never really caught on in North America, with most of the tall buildings opting for stone, brick, or glass/steel. Why is this?
Virtually all residential towers in North America are concrete construction.
For office towers, steel construction is more common, due to need for speed in building, need to span longer areas, and less need for soundproofing. Office tenants also have more tolerance for structural drift, when buildings sway slightly with the wind.
Your question mentions stone, brick, and glass, which for tall buildings are merely cladding for appearance, not structural materials. American residential highrises are usually built (by private enterprise) for a middle-class or upper-class urban market, so developers want to offer a very attractive appearance. Though the US built some highrises for social housing in decades past, they often didn't work out well, and the kind of large highrise projects for families seen in Asian and South American cities are very uncommon. In fact, developers very much want to avoid comparisons of their new buildings with the low-income public housing of the 1960s and 1970s. So concrete-frame buildings in the US will typically have large window areas, or be clad entirely in glass.
Americans (less so for Canadians) typically see highrise living as something only done by single young people or wealthy childless urbanites. There's a strong cultural preference for children only being raised in single-family houses with gardens. That means American cities have expanded outward, rather than built upward.
