Postwar society – in America as elsewhere – was beset with a multitude of problems. Affordable housing was high on the agenda of priorities – servicemen returning from World War II and a new generation of Americans that would become known as the ‘Baby Boomers’ were about to come into the world. Due to preoccupation with the war and its drain on US domestic manpower, housing construction levels were well down at a time that birth-rate numbers were about to take off.

Into this scenario, at a most opportune time, walked the Levitt family, father Abraham and sons Bill and Alfred. Bill Levitt, who took over the family real estate development business from his father, saw a chance to meet the country’s pressing accommodation needs by mass producing houses at lower cost. Levitt and Sons, as the company was called, had already entered the field pre-war, initially successfully but had failed in its first foray into the high-volume sector✱. Venturing into postwar low-cost housing bore a certain irony for the Levitts – as they had began their career in property development during the Depression building and selling high-end, custom-made houses to upper middle class people (the Strathmore project in Manhasset, Long Island). Indeed, the years spent making and selling exclusive, upscale properties to the gentry of New York made the family rich [‘William Levitt Facts’, (Your Dictionary), www.biography.yourdictionary.com].

Levittown, New York
The first mass scale suburban project, commenced in 1947, was at Island Trees, a hamlet in the town of Hempstead (Nassau County, Long Island). 1,400 tract-homes were sold in the first three hours of the opening of the Island Trees estate sales office [‘Levittown New York’, Wikipedia Republished, http://wiki2.org], within four years the Levitts had built 17,500 homes in Hempstead. The company concentrated on small two-bedroom dwellings, predominantly ‘rancher’ or Cape Cod style, seventh-of-an-acre lots (750 square foot). These tract-houses as they are known in the trade were modest structures, for the most part pretty basic (a living room, a kitchen, but no garage, an unfinished second floor) and pressed fairly close together in rows. But they were (initially anyway) very reasonably priced as well, affordable to US veterans from the World War, Levitt’s initial target market (“the Levittown house was the reduction of the American Dream to an affordable reality” as historian Barbara Kelly described it). Each Levittown housing complex was divided into distinct sections.

A revolutionary approach to housing
Prior to the advent of the Levittown model, house construction was done in a unitary fashion, a building company would work on a new home until completed and then move on to the next project (the average builder had been constructing only about four to five homes a year). William and Alfred Levitt✫, building on the mass-production experience of Californian builders, devised something radically different, a totally new division of labour to speed up the process dramatically. Construction was divided into 27 separate steps or operations, each worker or specialised team of workers would complete one step and then move to the next house to repeat the step there, and so on (for example one worker’s job would be the singular task of going from house to house bolting washing machines onto the floor all day!)[Schuyler, D. (2003), ‘Reflections on Levittown at Fifty’, Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, 70(1), 101-109. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27778531].

Everything on site was orchestrated to work seamlessly, the tradesmen were scheduled to arrive in a strictly planned sequence. Bill Levitt admired automobile tsar Henry Ford’s production methods and replicated them in what was an assembly line style of home construction. The comparison was widely noted, Time magazine called Bill Levitt “the Henry Ford of Housing” [Schuyler]. Others, only barely a little less grandly, styled him “the King of Suburbia”.

Vertical integration
Key to the spectacular success of Levitt & Sons (at its peak the company was constructing homes at the staggering rate of one every 16 minutes!), and its rapid prosperity, was the way it achieved a vertical integration of the industry…the company purchased its own forests in Oregon and started its own mills to provide the lumber it needed; a lot of the parts came in prefabricated; Levitt & Sons even made its own nails. It also purchased materials in mass quantities thus avoiding markups on prices paid [Schuyler]. By buying directly from the manufacturer, Levitt’s saved through cutting out the middleman in the process. Kenneth Jackson credited the Levitt brothers with “transforming a cottage industry into a major manufacturing process” [KT Jackson, Crabtree Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985)].

Integral to Bill Levitt’s cunning strategy for success was his exclusion of labour unions from his projects and his capacity to persuade lawmakers into softening industry regulations making Levittown easier to achieve [‘William Levitt Facts’]. Another huge advantage in boosting the success of Levitt’s projects was the securing of mortgage financing incentives from the federal government (veterans could buy into the estates with little or no down-payment) [‘Levittowns (Pennsylvania and New Jersey)’, (Suzanne Lashner Dayanim, The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia), www.philadelphiaencyclopedia.org].

Levittown, Pa. ca.1959

Levittown, Pennsylvania

The second Levittown (commenced in 1952) was located in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, about 20 miles north of Philadelphia. The Levitt houses built had limited exterior variations – six types: the Levittowner, the Rancher, the Jubilee, the Pennsylvanian, the Colonial, the Country Clubber – but again they were moderately priced with low down-payments. At project’s end, 1958, a total of 17,311 homes had been built on the site [‘Levittown, Pennsylvania’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Growth and expansion of the prototype
Eventually the Levittown concept of housing estates extended elsewhere – both far and wide. In Burlington County, New Jersey, Levittown Willingboro started in 1958, followed by Levittown Largo in Maryland, 1963, and two other Maryland communities, Bowie (1964) and Crofton (1970). As well, a Levittown in Puerto Rico was built in 1963, and two “Gallic Levittowns” in Northern France in the 1960s, Lésigny and Mennecy (both close to Paris)⍉.

The Levitt covenants
William Levitt, in the first instance at least, once he sold families a Levitt house, did not entirely leave them to their own devices. Owners had to comply with certain suburban covenants that he wrote into the contracts…the rules and regulations included no laundry to be done on Sundays and no fencing off of yards. Owners were required to keep their lawns mown and neatly hedged. Bill Levitt himself would drive around some of the communities on Saturdays to ensure that the residents complied with this edict – when he spotted properties that were non-compliant, he would despatch his own lawn-mowing team to do the job and bill the owners on the following weekday [‘Suburban Legend William Levitt’, (Richard Lacayo), Time, 07-Dec-1998, www.time.com].

There was another more controversial Levitt covenant, this one with grossly inequitable and far-reaching overtones. From the onset of the first Levittown, Bill Levitt refused outright to allow African-Americans to buy into the company’s housing estates. Levitt, a Jew, copped a lot of flak for his stance on excluding Black citizens, including Black veterans (see below FN re the dilemma of his Jewishness). I will detail this less edifying side of the Levittown phenomena in Part II of the blog.

Footnote: A “Gentlemen’s Agreement”:

‘Gentleman’s Agreement’, a lauded film of the day

William Levitt’s discrimination against Non-Whites in Levittown was preceded by a similar policy against his own race in the earlier, North Strathmore housing project. Despite being Jewish himself (and a generous benefactor of the state of Israel and an organiser of Jewish-American funding for Israel during the Six-Day War) Levitt in his business dealings would not buck the local practice of real-estate agents refusing to sell to Jews – the unspoken “Gentlemen’s Agreement” among Gentiles to discriminate against Jews [‘William Levitt Facts’].

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✱ building a 1,600-shack community in Norfolk, Virginia, which still had unsold units in 1950 [‘William Levitt’ Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
✫ William was overall the boss of the business as the financier and promoter, whilst Alfred created the mass production techniques, designed the homes and the developments’ layouts. Father, Abraham, pretty much early on took a step back, ceding the running of the enterprise to oldest son Bill. This allowed the elder Levitt (a horticulturist by training) free rein to pursuit his pet interest, taking charge of the Levitt projects’ landscaping.
⍉ Levitt designed tract-homes can be found also in Buffalo Grove and Vernon Hills (Illinois) and Fairfax (Virginia)

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𓇽 see also the October 2021 blog Lakewood Park, Ca Housing Development, the West Coast Answer to Levittown on www.7dayadventurer.com Lakewood Park, a mega-sized, rapidly constructed Californian housing development in the 1950s—the brainchild of three Jewish American developers—operated what was effectively a (unwritten) covenant discriminating against non-white prospective home-buyers.