Houses do not die easily.
Sure, they can starve; if a house is left abandoned for some time, it can grow hungry from loneliness, bitter towards its’ creators, & unscrupulous enough to open its doors & consume any who enter.
But they cannot die from starvation. Nor can you typically kill a house using regular implements, such as knives, guns, & poison.
Instead, to kill a house, you need to break its walls.
Walls are the house’s skeleton, you see. Its bones & muscles, which it uses to remain upright. Remove those, & the house ceases to function as it was intended.
As such, houses can be killed by things like natural disasters, old age & instability, or, indeed, a big enough gun.
Of course, one can argue that if you are small enough, the detritus of a dead house can act like walls, and that termites, stray animals & the like can still live in a house long after it has been “killed”.
But these are merely scavengers, arriving at a corpse to harvest its shelter, its safety.
However, there is one aspect of a house’s demise that serves as a particularly credible threat.
Because once a house dies, it begins to rot.
House rot is very different from organic rot. While animals, plants, & the like decompose in the physical sense, houses experience a more metaphysical decay.
For you see, as a house loses its’ structure, it also loses its’ sense of shelter. The concept leaks out like bile, soaking into nearby objects, imbuing a sense of homeliness to things ill-equipped to handle actual occupation.
The thing is, sapient beings are unable to parse the difference between actual shelter & the false “sheltering” that comes of house rot, and thus may attempt to take refuge beneath a hunk of dirty plaster or very confused stray dog, leading to less-than-desirable results.
So for all sakes, when you see a mound of debris in a place where a house should be, don’t stray too close. You wouldn’t want to take some shelter with you.