Part IThe Story
A Charity Patient on the Gold Coast
In the last weeks of January 1994, a man who had once finished a house every sixteen minutes lay in North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, Long Island, dying of kidney disease and, according to the historian Edward Berenson, still planning his comeback. He was a charity patient. He had once given the hospital millions. The ward sat on the same North Shore where, sixty years earlier, he had put up six-bedroom Tudors on the old Onderdonk farm for radio stars, surgeons, and lawyers at prices between $9,100 and $18,500. Those were his first houses. He had come back to the neighborhood where he started, which is one kind of comeback, though not the one he meant.
Nobody recorded what he was building in his head during those final weeks. Given what he had already built, the guess is uncomfortable. More than 140,000 houses in the United States, Puerto Rico, and France. Three towns bearing his name and a fourth that wore it for a while before giving it back. A 237-foot yacht named for his third wife, a thirty-room mansion called La Colline in Mill Neck, a fortune estimated in the late 1960s at more than $100 million. Then a decade and a half of failed ventures, a block of ITT stock pledged as collateral that lost 90 percent of its value, a state accusation that he had raided his own charitable foundation, and the settled fact of debt. He died on January 28, 1994, at eighty-six. "My husband always said he wanted to be the poorest man in the cemetery," his widow, Simone, told New York magazine two decades later, and then she laughed. "Guess what? He was!"
William Jaird Levitt is remembered, where he is remembered at all, as the man who invented the American suburb. He didn't, and the historian Kenneth T. Jackson has been careful to say so. What Levitt did was stranger and larger: he took an idea that already existed, a detached house on a lawn within reach of a city job, and turned it from a privilege into a product. He sold it in three minutes. He priced it below rent. And he decided, in capital letters and bold type, who could buy it.
That last decision is the one that outlived him. The houses are still there, most of them unrecognizable now, expanded and re-sided and fenced against their original covenants. The fortune is gone. What remains is the shape of the thing he made, a country arranged into lots, and the question of who got to stand on one.
By the Numbers
The Levitt Machine
140,000+Houses built by Levitt & Sons by the late 1960s
17,447Houses in Levittown, New York, 1947–1951
26Discrete construction steps per house
30/dayProduction rate on Long Island by July 1948
$7,990Price of the 1949 Levittown ranch, appliances included
$92MSale price to ITT in 1967, $62M of it in ITT stock
237 ftLength of the yacht *La Belle Simone*
The Rabbi's Grandson Builds for Radio Stars
His paternal grandfather was a rabbi from Russia; his grandmother came from Austria-Hungary. His father, Abraham, was born in Brooklyn and practiced real estate law, investing on the side. His mother was Pauline Biederman. William was born in Brooklyn on February 11, 1907, and five years later a brother, Alfred, arrived. William went to Public School 44 and Boys High School, then spent three years at New York University and left without a degree. That is roughly the whole of the documented childhood, which suits the man. He was never much for looking back, until the end, when there was nothing left to look at.
The family business began almost by accident, and the accident was debt. Abraham, the lawyer, had been buying land and selling it on to developers. When the Depression arrived and a developer of a Rockville Centre parcel defaulted, the Levitts found themselves holding land nobody would buy. So they built on it. Levitt & Sons was incorporated on August 2, 1929, eleven weeks before the crash. William, twenty-two, became president, responsible for advertising, sales, and financing. Alfred, still a teenager, became vice president of design and drafted the first Levitt house: a six-bedroom, two-bath Tudor that sold for more than $14,000.
That is where the Levitt story actually starts. Not with the cheap house but with the expensive one. Between 1929 and the mid-1930s, the family sold 600 upper-middle-class homes in a development called Strathmore, then built North Strathmore in Manhasset and another 1,200 houses across Manhasset, Great Neck, and Westchester County. William acquired a reputation as the man to see on the Gold Coast if you wanted a custom house and could pay for it. The buyers were radio stars, prominent journalists, surgeons, businessmen, lawyers: the professional class of a city that was, for the first time, beginning to imagine living somewhere other than the city.
And Strathmore barred Jews.
The grandson of a rabbi, building houses for the Protestant professional class of Long Island's North Shore, kept Jews out of his first development. There is no record of him agonizing over it. This was, to him, a condition of the market, the way the soil or the setback lines were conditions of the market, and he would treat race the same way for the rest of his career. The pattern is established here in miniature, a decade and a half before Levittown, before the FHA underwriting manuals could be blamed, before the veterans came home. The outsider builds the inside, and keeps the door.
Alfred was the other half of the arrangement, and he was a different sort of man. The Los Angeles Times described William as "the abrasive, confident businessman" and Alfred as a "more soft-spoken" designer without formal architectural training. In 1936, according to Brian Potter's history of the firm, Alfred paid $10,000 to watch the construction of Frank Lloyd Wright's Ben Rebhuhn house on Long Island. He came away with ideas about open floor plans and concrete slabs in place of basements, the dreamy Wrightian vocabulary of the Usonian house. Those ideas would reappear, stripped of their poetry, in 17,447 Cape Cods on the Hempstead Plains. Alfred learned from genius. William learned from the Navy.
Beg, Borrow, or Steal
The war nearly killed the business. A federal embargo on nonessential construction meant nobody was going to buy a custom Tudor, and Levitt & Sons would have sat idle had it not landed a government contract in 1941 to build housing for workers in Norfolk, Virginia. The accounts of the Norfolk job don't agree. One says 750 houses for naval officers in a year. Another says 1,600. Another says 2,350 rental units. A Harvard Business School case puts it at 2,000. The number wobbles depending on who is counting and what; the lesson doesn't. Norfolk was where the Levitts first broke house construction into repeatable steps, first poured slabs, first tried to make building a house resemble making something in a factory. "We have to dream up new methods," William announced, by one account.
Norfolk was also a failure. Units were still sitting unsold in 1950. This is worth pausing on, because the myth of Levitt tends to skip it: the method that would make him famous had already been tried, and it hadn't worked, because the method was never the whole of the thing. Norfolk had the technique without the demand or the financing. Levittown would have all three.
In 1942 William joined the Navy as a lieutenant in the Seabees, the construction battalions, and he spent the war watching men put up military housing out of uniform, interchangeable parts. He also spent it thinking. Decades later he told CBS News about the conversations in the Pacific:
— William Levitt, to CBS NewsWhen this war is over, you beg, borrow, or steal whatever you can and build housing, because there's going to be a huge backlog.
He had done more than talk. Before shipping out, he had taken options on potato and onion fields in the undeveloped middle of Long Island, in an area called Island Trees. The farmers were in trouble. A pest called the golden nematode had begun ruining potato crops in the area in the 1930s and early 1940s, and land values were falling. The Levitts bought at what the Levittown Historical Society calls "a greatly reduced price."
The name Island Trees has a small, perfect history. The Hempstead Plains were once some sixty thousand acres of flat, treeless grassland, considered the largest prairie in the eastern United States. In the middle of it stood an old grove of pines at the corner of what became Hempstead Turnpike and Jerusalem Avenue, and from a distance the grove looked like an island in a sea of grass. English colonists settled Hempstead in 1644. German farmers came after the railroad reached Hicksville in 1837. Cabbages and cucumbers gave way to potatoes after a blight in 1912. Then the nematode. Then Levitt.
He would plant trees there, eventually. Two in every front yard, all exactly the same distance apart. That was Abraham's job.
The Detroit Line, Reversed
"It was simple economics," Levitt said of the postwar shortage. "People needed roofs over their heads, and there weren't any roofs being built." The numbers support him. Something like ten million men and women came out of the armed services after 1945 into a country that had built almost nothing for fifteen years. Families doubled and tripled up. Chicago sold retired trolley cars as housing. Some fifty thousand veterans lived in Army huts. "People are practically living in refrigerators," Jackson said. The average American homebuilder, according to one account, put up about one house a year.
Levitt proposed to put up thirty a day, and by July 1948 he was doing it.
The method is best understood by walking the site, which the historian Edward Berenson has effectively done in Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia, his 2025 account of the Levitt empire. First, workers laid sewer pipe and built streets over it. Then trucks went down the new streets. "Every 100 feet," Time reported, the trucks "stopped and dumped identical bundles of lumber, pipes, bricks, shingles, and copper tubing—all as neatly packaged as loaves from a bakery." A fleet of cement mixers followed, each pouring a slab; there were no basements. A crew sank copper heating pipes into the wet concrete. A mechanical trowel leveled it. Levitt got the labor cost of each slab down to $55.
When the slab was dry, the framing crew arrived and put up a precut frame in a few hours. Another crew sheathed the roof in plywood thinner than code allowed; Levitt forced local authorities to approve it. Another covered the exterior in asphalt shingles developed specifically for the Levittown house, fastened with Levitt's own proprietary nails. Insulation went in. Drywall went up in four-foot sheets, and the width of the sheet dictated the dimensions of the house, because cutting boards in half was waste. Doors, windows, a prefabricated staircase. Walls spray-painted with a special Levitt paint. Cabinets. And then, last, the gleaming white, fully automatic Bendix washing machine, installed by a worker whose entire job, at every house, was that one step.
"Levitt houses," the sociologist John Liell wrote in 1952, "were assembled rather than built."
The whole process came down to twenty-six steps (some accounts say twenty-seven; the number drifts like the Norfolk count), each performed by a crew that did only that task, again and again, down the length of a street. Levitt was proud of the inversion, and he explained it the same way for forty years:
— William Levitt, to The New York Times, 1989What it amounted to was a reversal of the Detroit assembly line. There, the car moved while the workers stayed at their stations. In the case of our houses, it was the workers who moved, doing the same jobs at different locations. To the best of my knowledge, no one had ever done that before.
He was not quite as original as he claimed and not quite as Fordist as the comparison suggests. Ford owned his plant. Levitt's crews were mostly subcontractors, small companies nominally independent but working exclusively for him, paid a fixed amount per house. That fixed price did something clever: it moved the burden of controlling costs off Levitt's books and onto theirs. A subcontractor who could frame a house faster made more money. So did his men, who could earn, by some accounts, twice what they'd make elsewhere.
They did not belong to unions. Levitt froze out union labor, which brought pickets and blockades to his sites, and which let him do things union rules forbade, such as spraying paint on walls instead of having a craftsman brush it. He cut out middlemen, buying lumber and televisions directly from manufacturers. He built his own nail factory. He shipped precut lumber from his own operation in Blue Lake, California. He bought forests.
A detail recurs in the stories about him, and it is almost too good. Decades later, a real estate developer from Queens would tell a stadium of Boy Scouts that in his prime Levitt would go to his sites at night with teams of people and "scour the sites for nails and sawdust and small pieces of wood," so the workers would find them spotless in the morning. It may be true. It may be the kind of thing one developer says about another. What is certainly true is that Levitt manufactured his own nails, and a man who makes his own nails does not like to see them lying in the dirt.
At peak, the machine finished a house every sixteen minutes of an eight-hour day. David Halberstam put it at eleven. The legend accelerated faster than the crews.
Every Branch of Government as Partner
The method was necessary. It wasn't sufficient. Norfolk had proved that. What made Levittown possible was not Levitt's trucks but a set of public decisions that Levitt was exceptionally good at extracting, and he knew it. In a 1953 newsreel interview for The March of Time, standing in the open land of what would become Levittown, Pennsylvania, he complained that he hadn't had a "free hand": he'd had to provide all the services, put in the streets and the lights, and his development, he said, had every branch of government as a partner.
He meant it as a complaint. It reads now as a confession.
Start with the building code. The Town of Hempstead required basements. Levitt's houses had none; they sat on slabs, as they had in Norfolk. Changing the code took a campaign, and the campaign was run not by Levitt but by a newspaper. Alicia Patterson, the pioneering founder and publisher of Newsday, a pilot and society figure whom one employee remembered as "sort of a princess," decided that Long Island needed houses and that Levitt was the man to build them. Her editorial page urged readers to pack a Hempstead Town Board meeting. "Thousands of veterans answered Newsday's call," a 1960s promotional film for the paper crowed. The board had reservations, and not only about concrete. According to Desmond Ryan of the civic group A Better Long Island, the Republicans who controlled the board feared that an instant suburb full of New York City Democrats would upend local politics. "What they didn't realize," Ryan said, "was that when you put young Democratic families into their own homes, they become Republicans."
The local board approved the project on May 21, 1947. Levitt had already announced it on May 7. Within two days of the announcement, the New York Herald Tribune reported, half the planned 2,000 rental houses had been spoken for. The Levitts added 4,000 more.
Then there was the federal money. The Veterans Administration and the Federal Housing Administration guaranteed mortgages for qualified veterans on terms that made buying cheaper than renting. At first Levitt rented, $65 a month with an option to buy at $6,990 and no down payment for veterans. As the federal machinery came fully online, he switched to selling. By 1949 the ranch model went for $7,990, about $58 a month on a thirty-year mortgage, washer and refrigerator included. With the GI Bill, many buyers' up-front cost came to around $400. "It was probably the best deal in American history," Jackson said.
It was also a deal with conditions, and the most important condition wasn't written by Levitt, though he never objected to it. The FHA would insure mortgages in developments that were not racially mixed. It would not, as a practical matter, insure the others. "None of this would happen without the federal government," the architectural historian Gabrielle Esperdy said in a 2016 documentary about Levittown. That sentence cuts two ways, and Levitt spent his career letting the government take the credit for the part he didn't want.
The Levitts were quick, too, to hand off the parts of a planned community that cost money to maintain. Pools, parks, community centers: Levittown sprawled across the boundaries of existing towns and school districts, and the surrounding municipalities were left to fund schools, sewers, and water. Levittown, New York, never incorporated. There were proposals in 1949 and 1952. Nothing came of them. It remains, officially, a hamlet: fifty thousand people, no mayor.
A New Way of Life, For Sale
In 1949, Levitt placed an ad in The New York Times for a Cape Cod-style house at $58 a month. When he went out to the model, there was a line. People kept arriving. They organized eating breaks to hold their places. Berenson describes prospective buyers camping out for two days for the chance to put down a deposit. When the sales office opened, by one account, 1,400 contracts were signed on the first day.
The sales process had been rebuilt the same way the house had. By the end, a buyer could go from choosing a house to signing the contract in three minutes. There were five ranch models, effectively identical, differing in exterior color and window placement. In 1950 a carport and a built-in television were added. In 1951, a partially finished attic. The house itself was about 750 square feet: two bedrooms, twelve by twelve and twelve by eight; a living room twelve by nineteen; a kitchen nine and a half by ten and a half; a bath. The attic was left unfinished so a family could grow upward into it. It was a small house designed to be completed by the people who bought it, and they did, at a rate that has left almost nothing original standing. The Town of Hempstead now maintains the Weber House as one of the few unaltered examples. The Smithsonian has said it would like one.
Kate Murray, who grew up to be Hempstead town supervisor, remembered how her parents got theirs. They were renting a Levitt house when word came that it would be sold. "My mother ran down to the construction-mobiles onsite and signed for the house with just her signature." Polly Dwyer, who bought with her husband in 1954 and later became president of the Levittown Historical Society, put it more plainly. "I lived with my mother-in-law," she said, laughing. "You could see why I was overjoyed coming to this house!" And, on another occasion: "I thank God for William Levitt."
The first 300 families moved in on October 1, 1947, starting with the Bladykas family. On January 1, 1948, Island Trees officially became Levittown. On July 3, 1950, William Levitt appeared on the cover of Time. The tagline was "For Sale: a new way of life," and the way of life came with rules. You mowed your lawn. You did not fence your yard. In the Pennsylvania Levittown, you did not hang laundry out to dry on Sunday. The rules, like the houses, eventually gave way to the people who lived under them; backyard pools became affordable, privacy mattered, the fences went up.
The critics were there from the beginning, and some of them were funny. In 1960, on Leave It to Beaver, Ward Cleaver tells his son a fable about villagers who built castles to keep out their neighbors. What stories, he asks his wife, do the people in castles tell their children? June Cleaver: "Probably stories about Levittown." Allan Sherman sang about having to sell the house in Levittown. Mad magazine made jokes about wife-swapping. Early residents, the Baltimore Sun noted, repainted their houses in odd color combinations just to tell them apart. Billy Joel, who grew up in a Levitt house in adjacent Hicksville, put an aerial photograph of Levittown on the inner sleeve of The Nylon Curtain. Tim Burton modeled the pastel street of Edward Scissorhands on it.
The sneering always missed the point that Dwyer grasped instantly, living with her mother-in-law. The sameness was the price, and the price was the point.
In February 1952, construction began on the second Levittown, on land bought the previous year in Lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania, beside U.S. Steel's new Fairless Works. The Levitts had meant to do something else first: a smaller, richer Long Island community called Landia, with 1,750 houses of about 1,200 square feet at $13,000 each, a thirty-acre industrial district screened by woods, a train station, housing close to work. The Korean War restricted building materials, and the government approved the Pennsylvania project for strategic reasons instead. Landia never left the drawing board.
Levittown, Pennsylvania, was more ambitious than the first: 17,311 houses by 1958, six models (the Levittowner, the Rancher, the Jubilee, the Pennsylvanian, the Colonial, and the Country Clubber), curving roads with no four-way intersections, school sites donated in every neighborhood, Olympic-sized pools, and a shopping center, the Shop-a-Rama, with a 6,000-car parking lot. Every street in a section began with the section's letter. An estimated 30,000 people came to see the first four sample houses in a single weekend. David Marable's parents paid $9,990 for a Levittowner at 30 Wisteria Lane. His father sold helicopter parts for the Navy. The down payment was zero.
Clause 25
The first Levittown residents signed a standard lease with an option to buy. Clause 25, in capital letters and bold type, stated that the house could not "be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race." Sales agents knew before sales began that applications from Black families would not be accepted. Black veterans of the war that Levitt had built his pitch around could not buy a Levitt house. They could fight in the Pacific alongside the Seabees; they could not live on Pinewood Drive.
Levitt's defense never changed. It was a business decision, not a prejudice. He was protecting property values. The company could not solve racial segregation and the housing shortage at the same time. The Levitts said they would open sales to Black buyers after selling as many houses to white buyers as they could. And then this, which he offered, as David Kushner records, as though it settled something:
— William LevittAs a Jew, I have no room in my heart for racial prejudice. But the plain fact is that most whites prefer not to live in mixed communities. This attitude may be wrong morally, and someday it may change. I hope it will.
It is a remarkable sentence, and it rewards the close reading that Levitt never gave it. The appeal to his Jewishness as proof of innocence, from the man who had barred Jews from Strathmore. The hope, sincere or not, for a change he was positioned to cause more than almost anyone alive, and declined to. The phrase "plain fact," which is what a salesman says when a preference has become a policy. He genuinely seems to have believed that housing and race were two separate matters, as though you could build a town and remain neutral about who lived in it.
The legal ground was moving under him almost immediately. In 1948, in Shelley v. Kraemer, the U.S. Supreme Court declared racial covenants in deeds "unenforceable as law and contrary to public policy." A group called the Committee to End Discrimination in Levittown formed to push for integration. Levitt kept selling to whites only. The covenant could not be enforced in court; the sales office didn't need a court.
The break came in Pennsylvania, and not through Levitt. Bea and Lew Wechsler, a Jewish couple from the Bronx who had moved to Levittown, connected a Black family with a neighbor who wanted to sell. In 1957, William and Daisy Myers bought a secondhand house at 43 Deepgreen Lane, in the Dogwood Hollow section. William was a World War II Army veteran. Daisy was a schoolteacher. They had three young children.
The attacks began immediately. Crowds of hundreds gathered outside the house for days. Neighbors formed the Levittown Betterment Committee to drive the family out and make Levittown white again, and met in a nearby house they called "the Confederate House," with a Confederate flag outside and "Dixie" playing on a record player, over and over, a few hundred feet from the home of a Black veteran. State authorities intervened. There was an injunction, and criminal charges against the harassers. Quakers, the American Jewish Congress, and the William Penn Center organized round-the-clock patrols; white couples babysat the Myers children and cleaned up after the attacks. Martin Luther King Jr. met with the family and wrote to them. They stayed four more years, until William took a job in Harrisburg. Daisy Myers came to be called "the Rosa Parks of the North." She wrote a book about it, and died on December 5, 2011, in York, Pennsylvania. The whole saga, and Levitt's place in it, is told in Kushner's Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America's Legendary Suburb.
Levitt did not change course. The NAACP and the ACLU opposed him. The FHA, having once required segregation, now threatened to refuse mortgages on his next project. He went ahead with a third whites-only Levittown, in Willingboro Township, New Jersey, which opened in 1958, and fought the state's anti-discrimination authorities in the New Jersey courts. The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled against Levitt & Sons on February 9, 1960. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal. In 1963 there were civil rights protests at Belair at Bowie, in Maryland, where Levitt had bought the colonial estate of Governor Samuel Ogle in 1957 and planted another white suburb around it.
The residue is measurable. As late as the 1990 census, only a tiny fraction of Levittown, New York, was nonwhite. In 2020 the hamlet was about 1.3 percent non-Hispanic Black. In December 2020, Nassau County began allowing property owners to scrub the racist language from their deeds, meaning that it had still been there to scrub. By the 1960s, Levittown's population was roughly a third Catholic, a third Protestant, and a third Jewish. Some of the lines had moved. One hadn't.
Brothers and Wives
The division of labor at Levitt & Sons had been as clean as the one on the construction sites. Alfred designed the houses and the curving streets. Abraham planted the trees. William raised the money, sold the product, and, in the Wikipedia formulation that reads like a job description, "persuaded lawmakers to rewrite the laws that made Levittown possible." It worked while all three were in the room.
In 1954, discord in the family split the company. Alfred left. William took full control. The sources say little about what happened, which is its own kind of information; families that build towns together don't tend to publish the minutes when they stop. Abraham died in August 1962, at eighty-two. After 1954, the soft-spoken designer who had paid $10,000 to watch Frank Lloyd Wright build a house was gone from the firm, and the abrasive, confident salesman was running it alone.
He was expanding his household at the same time as his territory. He had married Rhoda Kirshner in November 1929, three months after the company's incorporation; they had two sons, William Jr., born in 1932, and James, born in 1944. They divorced in 1959. The same year, Levitt married his longtime mistress, Alice D. Kenny, an interior decorator at Levitt & Sons, and adopted her two daughters. That marriage ended in 1969, when he married Simone Korchin, a French art dealer.
Simone's own life had been a compression of the century's worst decades. She came, she said, from a middle-class Jewish-Greek family in Paris. Her mother played poker, one of the only women in the city allowed to play with men, and fed the family on her winnings during the war; Simone could tell whether they would eat that day by her mother's face. Simone was jailed, placed with orphans, and came close to being sent to Auschwitz. Her mother died at forty-eight and never made it to America. A Holocaust survivor married the man who built the white American suburb; the yacht bore her name; the mansion in Mill Neck had thirty rooms and a staff; she was forty and one of the hostesses of New York. At eighty-four she lived alone in a rented one-bedroom on the East Side, the walls covered in photographs of the Levitts with presidents and movie stars, a maid serving lunch to keep up appearances. "If she had not once been half of a storied power couple," the writer who visited her observed, "you'd figure Simone had once owned a great deli."
The company, meanwhile, kept going. It went public in 1960. It built in six Eastern states. Strathmore at Matawan in New Jersey, 5,000 houses, reused the name of the old Gold Coast development, the same brand now aimed at a different buyer. Levittown, Puerto Rico, went up in 1963 on drained marshland in Toa Baja, with a 150-foot sky-blue water tower that pilots used as a navigational checkpoint. In France, where fifty-one years of rent control had produced a housing shortage, more than 60,000 Parisians came out to gape at Levitt's American-style subdivision at Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis, a town of 2,000. Time called it "an invasion." Fiscal 1965 sales were $60 million, and Levitt was, the magazine said, the biggest homebuilder in the United States. The same year he received the Frank P. Brown Medal from the Franklin Institute, an engineering honor. The salesman got the engineers' prize.
Lost Momentum
In July 1967, at sixty, Levitt sold the company to the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation for $92 million. Sixty-two million of it came in ITT stock. The contract made him president of the renamed Levitt Corp. and bound him with a non-compete: for ten years he could not found or work for another American homebuilder. He had expected, apparently, to play an active role in ITT's larger affairs. The conglomerate's executives felt he was too old to take on more responsibility.
He stayed president until 1972, overseeing projects in Palm Coast, Florida, and in Virginia, and then he did what men with a fortune and a ten-year prohibition do. The yacht. The mansion. The Riviera, the social pages; Simone kept a scrapbook, now at Hofstra, of clippings from 1970 to 1973: Golda Meir, Richard Nixon, Monte Carlo, the United Jewish Appeal. It was an interval of pure consumption from a man whose whole genius had been production.
When the non-compete expired, he went back to building, and he failed. A series of companies and joint ventures through the 1970s and 1980s collapsed. The ITT stock he pledged as collateral lost 90 percent of its value. The Levitt Corp., which still carried his name without him, lost its license to do business in Prince George's County, Maryland, in October 1978, after inspectors found more than 2,500 code violations in 122 homes in a subdivision called Northview. In February 1979 a federal appeals court in Levitt Corp. v. Levitt was deciding how far a man who had sold his company could trade on his own name. He was accused of misappropriating money from the Levitt Foundation, his charity, and agreed to repay at least $5 million; one account puts it at $11 million. ITT had sold the Levitt subsidiary to Starrett Housing in 1979. The empire that had once built a house every sixteen minutes couldn't pass inspection in Maryland.
Brian Potter has argued that the collapse wasn't only a matter of personal decline. Levitt's model worked in a narrow window: cheap fringe land, a government eager to finance, a backlog of pent-up demand, and localities willing to rewrite their codes for a builder who promised to house veterans. By the late 1960s the market had changed and land-use controls had tightened. Even at its peak, Potter suggests, Levitt pushed scale beyond what pure economics could justify. Levittown was the answer to a set of conditions, and the conditions ended.
There is a version of this story that a later generation of real estate men would tell for him. In a July 2017 speech to the Boy Scouts of America's National Jamboree, President Donald Trump described seeing Levitt, old and alone, in the corner of a party thrown by Steve Ross, the founder of Time Warner, while the hottest people in New York ignored him. "Donald," Levitt supposedly said, "I lost my momentum." Trump told the story again at the University of Alabama and again at West Point in 2025, where it acquired a "trophy wife" and misidentified ITT as Gulf and Western. James Levitt, the developer's son, called the first telling "pure hypocrisy." The anecdote keeps changing. The moral stays fixed, which is usually a sign that the moral came first.
Whether or not the scene happened as told, the word is right. Momentum was the whole of it: the trucks every hundred feet, the crews moving down the street, the next site, the next town, the next country. The machine only made sense in motion. Levitt had sold the machine for stock, and the stock was the part of the deal he couldn't control.
Veterans Parkway
The houses outlived the man, and they outlived the company too. Levitt & Sons passed from ITT to Starrett to BankAtlantic, shrank to Florida, and on November 9, 2007, as the early-century housing boom came apart, became the largest American homebuilder to file for bankruptcy. On October 30, 2013, a private investment firm called Oak Point Partners bought what the court called the remnant assets, "any known and unknown assets that weren't previously administered." That is how the Levitt name ended as a business: sold as a lot of leftovers, contents unspecified.
The towns went their own ways. The Pennsylvania Levittown won the Little League World Series in 1960, rioted over gas lines in June 1979 at an intersection called Five Points, lost its shopping center to an enclosed mall in the 1970s, and closed four of its five Levitt pools in 2002. The Puerto Rican one was quietly renamed Mansión del Mar by the Census Bureau before 2020; its water tower is now a library. The New York one, at 51,758 people in 2020, is the most populous unincorporated place in Nassau County, increasingly South Asian and Hispanic, its houses selling for many multiples of $7,990. Bill Yeingst of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History has said he would like to acquire an original ranch, dismantle it, move it to Washington, and reconstruct it among the other innovations in American home life. "None of this," he cautioned, "is set in concrete."
The Willingboro Levittown had reverted to its old township name long before. It had fought the state to stay white, and lost, and had become, over the decades, something its builder would not have planned for. But one piece of him remained on the map: the main road through town, Levitt Parkway.
On November 1, 2022, the town renamed it. The sign now reads Veterans Parkway.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows are the operating principles that can be extracted from Levitt's career, the ones that built 140,000 houses and the ones that lost everything afterward. Some are instructions. Some are warnings. Several are both, because Levitt's great strength and his great failure frequently came from the same habit of mind: an absolute confidence that anything not measured in dollars was somebody else's department.
The principles
- 1.Buy the land before the war ends.
- 2.Move the workers, not the product.
- 3.Own the bottleneck, down to the nail.
- 4.Rewrite the rules before you pour the slab.
- 5.Price against rent, not against houses.
- 6.Engineer the sale like the building.
- 7.Put the dream inside the box.
- 8.Push cost discipline to the edge with fixed unit prices.
- 9.Keep your counterweight in the room.
- 10.Know which conditions are temporary.
- 11.Never trade your operating role for currency you can't control.
- 12.The moral debts you call "market conditions" compound.
L
The Arc of Levitt & Sons
From Depression-era foreclosure land to remnant assets sold out of bankruptcy.
1929
Levitt & Sons incorporated August 2; William, 22, becomes president.
1941
Wartime contract for housing in Norfolk, Virginia; first experiments in mass production.
1942
William joins the Navy Seabees as a lieutenant; options on Long Island potato fields already in hand.
1947
Levittown announced May 7; ground broken July 1; first 300 families move in October 1.
1950
Time cover: "For Sale: a new way of life."
1952
Construction begins on Levittown, Pennsylvania.
1954
Family split; Alfred leaves, William takes full control.
1957
William and Daisy Myers become the first Black family in Levittown, Pennsylvania.
1960
Company goes public; New Jersey Supreme Court rules against Levitt in Willingboro discrimination case.
1967
Sold to ITT for $92 million, $62 million in stock; ten-year non-compete.
1978
Levitt Corp. loses its Prince George's County license over 2,500+ code violations.
1994
William Levitt dies January 28, a charity patient in Manhasset.
2007
Levitt & Sons files for Chapter 11 on November 9.
Principle 1
Buy the land before the war ends
Levitt took options on the Island Trees potato fields before he deployed. The farmers were selling because a nematode was destroying their crop; the price was, in the historical society's words, "greatly reduced." He wasn't guessing about demand in 1946. He was positioned for it by 1942, sitting in the Pacific telling fellow officers to "beg, borrow, or steal" whatever they could once the shooting stopped.
The insight is that the backlog was knowable. Construction had been frozen for most of fifteen years and millions of servicemen were going to come home and start families. Anyone could do that arithmetic. Very few people acted on it while the outcome of the war itself was still in doubt, because acting required capital committed against an uncertain date. Levitt's advantage was not superior information but superior willingness to own the input — land — while it was cheap, distressed, and ignored.
The Norfolk failure sharpens the point. Technique without timing had produced unsold units. The land purchase is what converted a method into a fortune.
Tactic: Identify the input your future business will depend on, and acquire it while its current owners are selling for reasons that have nothing to do with your thesis.
Principle 2
Move the workers, not the product
Levitt's most quoted line describes an inversion: in Detroit the car moved past stationary workers; in Levittown, the houses stayed put and crews moved down the street. The house could not travel, so he made the labor travel. Twenty-six steps, twenty-six specialized crews, each doing one thing at every lot.
What's instructive is not the Ford analogy but the refusal to be blocked by the disanalogy. Housing seemed un-Fordable because the product was fixed to land. Most builders concluded that housing therefore had to remain a craft. Levitt concluded that the assembly line was a principle — specialization plus sequence plus repetition — rather than a conveyor belt. He kept the principle and discarded the belt.
The dimensional discipline followed from this. A four-foot drywall sheet set the house's dimensions because cutting it was waste. Once the process is the product, the design bends to the process.
⚙
Craft Building vs. the Levitt System
How Levitt reorganized each element of homebuilding.
| Element | Conventional builder, 1940s | Levitt & Sons |
|---|---|---|
| Output | A handful of houses a year | 30 a day by July 1948 |
| Labor | Skilled generalists, union rules | Specialized non-union crews, one step each |
| Foundation | Basement, per local code | Poured slab; code rewritten |
| Materials | Bought through dealers | Own nails, own lumber, direct from manufacturers |
| Painting | Brushed by craftsmen | Sprayed |
| Contracting | Time and materials | Fixed price per house to exclusive subcontractors |
| Sale | Negotiated, slow | Selection to contract in three minutes |
Tactic: When a production model seems impossible in your industry, separate the principle from its familiar mechanism and ask which constraint you can invert.
Principle 3
Own the bottleneck, down to the nail
Levitt built a nail factory. He shipped precut lumber from his own operation in Blue Lake, California. He bought forests. He bought televisions and lumber directly from manufacturers and developed proprietary shingles and expansion nails for his houses. This looks like vanity integration until you consider what a thirty-house-a-day line needs: absolute certainty that the next bundle will be on the curb every hundred feet.
A reverse assembly line is fragile in a specific way. If the drywall crew arrives and the insulation hasn't gone in, every crew behind it stops. Integration wasn't primarily about margin; it was about protecting throughput from suppliers who had no stake in his cadence. The cost savings came, but the real product of vertical integration was reliability of flow.
It also made the whole system opaque to competitors. Anyone could copy the house. Copying the supply chain was harder.
Tactic: Map the single input whose late arrival would stop your entire operation, and bring it under your control even if it seems beneath you.
Principle 4
Rewrite the rules before you pour the slab
The Town of Hempstead required basements. Levitt's houses didn't have them. Local rules governed plywood thickness; Levitt forced authorities to approve thinner sheathing. None of this was accomplished by Levitt alone. Newsday's Alicia Patterson campaigned for the code change and rallied thousands of veterans to a town board meeting, and the board overcame Republican anxiety about an influx of city Democrats.
Levitt's genius here was framing. He didn't ask for a variance for a developer; he asked for housing for veterans, at a moment when nobody wanted to stand at a microphone and oppose veterans. He let a crusading publisher carry the argument. And he understood, as he put it in 1953, that his development had "every branch of government as partner" — the FHA and VA mortgage guarantees were as much a part of the product as the Bendix.
The dependency cuts both ways. The same federal partner that required segregation later threatened to withhold mortgages to end it. Partners that write the rules can rewrite them.
Tactic: Treat regulation as a design input to be shaped early, and find the ally whose public mission makes your change look like their cause rather than your profit.
Principle 5
Price against rent, not against houses
Levitt's houses began as rentals at $65 a month. When the federal financing machinery matured, he offered ownership with no down payment and monthly costs equal to rent. The 1949 ranch went for $7,990, about $58 a month. With the GI Bill, many buyers put down roughly $400. Jackson's verdict: "probably the best deal in American history."
The move was to change the comparison set. A veteran living with his mother-in-law was not comparing Levitt's Cape Cod against a Gold Coast Tudor. He was comparing a monthly payment against the rent he was already paying, or against the humiliation of not paying rent at all. Once ownership cost the same per month as renting, the decision stopped being a financial stretch and became an obvious upgrade.
This required financing infrastructure Levitt did not build. His contribution was noticing that the new mortgage terms made the monthly number, not the sticker price, the only number that mattered.
Tactic: Find the price your customer is already paying for an inferior substitute and structure your offer to match it month for month.
Principle 6
Engineer the sale like the building
By 1949 a Levittown buyer could move from choosing a house to signing the contract in three minutes. The five ranch models were effectively identical. Choice was reduced to exterior color and window placement. The day sales opened, by one account, 1,400 contracts were signed.
Most businesses that industrialize production forget that the sale is also a production line. A thirty-house-a-day build rate is useless if closing takes a week per buyer. Levitt applied the same logic — standardization, specialization, elimination of negotiation — to the transaction. The narrow menu wasn't a limitation the customers tolerated; it was what made the speed possible, and speed was what let a line of campers become 1,400 signatures.
The lesson extends past housing: throughput is set by the slowest process in the chain, and for many companies that process is not manufacturing but closing.
Tactic: Time your sales process end to end, then strip out every choice and negotiation step that doesn't change whether the customer buys.
Principle 7
Put the dream inside the box
The crowning detail of the Levitt house, as Berenson notes, was a gleaming white, fully automatic Bendix washing machine. Later models added a built-in television. The house came with a refrigerator, a landscaped lawn, two trees at measured intervals. Time summarized the pitch: "For Sale: a new way of life."
Levitt understood that 750 square feet on a slab was not, by itself, aspirational. The appliances were. Buying them directly from manufacturers at volume cost him relatively little; to a young family they represented the modern kitchen the magazines promised. Bundling converted a small house into a complete answer, one that required no second purchase before the family could start living the life in the advertisement.
The unfinished attic was the other half of the trick: a promise of growth that the buyer would pay to fulfill later, on his own time.
Tactic: Bundle the one high-perceived-value item your customers would otherwise have to buy separately, and leave one visible space for them to grow into.
Principle 8
Push cost discipline to the edge with fixed unit prices
Most Levitt crews were subcontractors, officially independent but working exclusively for Levitt and paid a fixed amount per house. That single contractual choice shifted the incentive to control costs from headquarters to the crews themselves. A framer who worked faster earned more. His men, by some accounts, could earn twice the prevailing wage.
This is a decentralized management system disguised as a procurement policy. Levitt didn't need to supervise each crew's efficiency; the price did it. It also gave him the cost certainty that let him advertise fixed monthly payments to the public.
The cost of the model was conflict. Levitt froze out unions, drew pickets, and built a reputation for hostility to organized labor that followed him. The system rewarded speed, which is not the same thing as quality — a distinction that would matter in Northview decades later.
Tactic: Where you can specify the output precisely, pay per unit delivered and let the price do the supervision, but audit quality independently.
Principle 9
Keep your counterweight in the room
The original firm ran on a three-way division: Alfred designed, Abraham landscaped, William sold and financed and persuaded. The Los Angeles Times described William as abrasive and confident, Alfred as soft-spoken. Alfred had paid $10,000 to watch Frank Lloyd Wright build a house; William had learned from the Seabees. The combination produced Levittown.
After the 1954 split, William ran everything alone. The sources do not establish that Alfred's absence caused what followed, and it would be too neat to claim so. But the pattern of the later career — international expansion, public listing, the sale to ITT, the lavish interlude, the failed return, the code violations — is the pattern of a promoter with nobody in the room whose job was to say what the product actually was.
Great operators often come in pairs precisely because the qualities that build demand and the qualities that build product rarely live in one temperament.
Tactic: Identify the colleague whose temperament most opposes yours on product questions and structure the company so their judgment can't be routed around.
Principle 10
Know which conditions are temporary
Brian Potter's analysis of Levitt's decline is blunt: the model worked in a narrow postwar window of cheap fringe land, lavish federal financing, pent-up demand, and permissive local codes. By the late 1960s the market had changed and land-use controls had tightened. Levittown, Potter argues, "was ultimately a response to a temporary set of housing market conditions, not the herald of a new, better way of building."
Levitt appears to have mistaken the window for the method. When he returned to building in the late 1970s, he tried to reapply a formula whose preconditions had disappeared. The shelved Landia plan of 1951 is suggestive: a smaller, job-integrated community designed for a different moment, which the Korean War pushed aside and which never returned.
Every extraordinary business sits on a few extraordinary conditions. The discipline is to name them explicitly and watch them.
!
The Conditions Behind Levittown
Which inputs were durable, and which were temporary.
| Condition | Status by the 1970s |
|---|---|
| Fifteen years of pent-up housing demand | Exhausted |
| Cheap distressed farmland near cities | Largely developed |
| FHA/VA mortgage guarantees | Changed terms, anti-discrimination rules |
| Localities eager to waive codes for veterans | Tighter land-use controls |
| Process know-how: sequencing, specialization | Durable, widely copied |
Tactic: Write down the three external conditions your success most depends on and set a review date to test whether each still holds.
Principle 11
Never trade your operating role for currency you can't control
In July 1967 Levitt sold for $92 million, $62 million of it in ITT stock, and accepted a ten-year non-compete. He expected a significant role inside the conglomerate; its executives thought he was too old. He stayed president of a subsidiary until 1972. Later he pledged the ITT stock as collateral for new ventures, and the stock lost 90 percent of its value.
Each piece of the transaction was individually defensible. Together they removed everything that had made him Levitt: the operating role, the ability to build, and the independence of his wealth from someone else's management. His fortune became a bet on ITT's share price, placed by a man who had no say in ITT's decisions and then leveraged that bet to fund projects in a market he no longer understood.
The second-order risk was the one that ruined him — not the sale, but the collateral.
Tactic: Before accepting acquirer stock, model what happens to your plans if it falls by 90 percent, and never borrow against it to fund your next act.
Principle 12
The moral debts you call market conditions compound
Levitt treated race the way he treated soil: an external condition of the market. He barred Jews from Strathmore in the 1930s, excluded Black buyers from every Levittown, defended the policy as protecting property values, fought New Jersey all the way to a U.S. Supreme Court refusal in 1960. "The plain fact," he said, "is that most whites prefer not to live in mixed communities."
It is tempting to excuse him by pointing at the FHA, which conditioned financing on segregation. The record doesn't allow it. He segregated before the FHA required it and continued after the FHA threatened to withhold mortgages to stop it. The policy was his. Its costs arrived slowly and then permanently: the violence against the Myers family at 43 Deepgreen Lane, protests at Bowie, a 1990 census still showing only a tiny nonwhite fraction, deeds carrying racist language into 2020, his name taken off a Willingboro parkway in 2022. Berenson argues the legacy contributed to the stubborn racial wealth gap in American homeownership.
For operators, the lesson is not abstract. A policy adopted because "the market prefers it" becomes part of what you built, and it outlives the market that justified it.
Tactic: For any exclusion you justify by customer preference, ask whether you would defend it on your name twenty years after the preference has changed.
Free playbook
Get The Business Model Playbook
58 business models, one visual page each: how the money flows, the metrics that matter, and who runs it. Free when you join the Faster Than Normal email.
Free. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— William Levitt, to CBS NewsIt was simple economics. People needed roofs over their heads, and there weren't any roofs being built.
— Kenneth T. Jackson, historian, author of Crabgrass FrontierWilliam Levitt was to suburbs as Henry Ford was to the auto. Neither one of them invented it. Neither one of them made any major contribution to the technology or the idea, but both of them popularized it, both of them did it in a bigger way than anyone had done it before.
— Polly Dwyer, Levittown homeowner since 1954I thank God for William Levitt.
— Simone Levitt, to New York magazine, 2013My husband always said he wanted to be the poorest man in the cemetery. Guess what? He was!
Maxims
- Own the input while it's distressed. The best time to buy the land is when the people selling it are thinking about nematodes, not about you.
- Keep the principle, discard the mechanism. The assembly line was never the conveyor belt; it was sequence, specialization, and repetition.
- Throughput is a supply chain problem. A line that moves thirty houses a day dies the first morning the drywall doesn't arrive.
- Let the standard dimension set the design. When the four-foot sheet dictates the room, the process has become the product.
- Match the rent, not the competition. Customers compare your price to what they already pay, not to what your rivals charge.
- The sale is a production line too. Three minutes from choice to contract is an engineering achievement, not a sales trick.
- Government partners write and rewrite the rules. The agency that finances your model can also finance its end.
- A promoter needs a designer in the room. Demand-builders and product-builders are rarely the same temperament.
- Momentum is not an asset you can bank. Sold for stock and parked on a yacht, it doesn't keep.
- What you exclude becomes what you built. The fortune disappears; the lines you drew on the map stay drawn.
