Levitt, William Jaird

(b. 11 February 1907 in Brooklyn, New York; d. 28 January 1994 in Manhasset, New York), builder and developer best known for his Levittowns, postwar suburban subdivisions in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

Levitt was one of two sons born to Abraham Levitt, a real estate lawyer, and Pauline Biederman. He entered New York University in 1924 but left without graduating in 1927 to join his father’s law firm. Levitt’s 1929 marriage to Rhoda Kirshner, with whom he had two sons, ended in divorce in 1959. In the same year, he married Alice Kenny, who he divorced in 1969, once again marrying before the year was out, this time to Simone Korchin.

When a client defaulted on a land deal in 1929, Levitt’s father formed Levitt and Sons to develop the property. William Levitt managed the firm, while his brother Alfred designed the houses. In the 1930s they built several developments on former estates in Manhasset, Long Island, and deeded the mansions to the residents for use as clubhouses. The Levitts’s nearby “Miracle Mile” shopping center lured suburban branches of Manhattan department stores to the community.

In 1941 the Levitts built 2,350 defense housing units at Norfolk, Virginia. Of these, 1,600 were slab-based worker houses, constructed in assembly-line fashion. It was here that Levitt conceived the idea for his Levittown project. He later served at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii as a lieutenant with the naval construction battalions, the Seabees; meanwhile, at home, the firm took options on 1,000 acres on Long Island’s Hempstead Plains. In 1946, with the war over and a housing shortage underway, Levitt and Sons purchased additional land to complete their holdings and announced plans to build affordable housing for veterans.

The plans met with considerable opposition from local community, political, and labor leaders concerned with the rudimentary nature of the houses and the use of concrete slabs and labor-saving new materials. Levitt launched a public-relations campaign around the themes of patriotism and social justice, and in May 1947 house-hungry veterans filled the local town hall, successfully demanding the necessary changes to the building codes. In July, Levitt broke ground for what would become Levittown, a mass-produced subdivision of four-room Cape Cod houses.

Levitt reduced construction to about twenty-six steps, each of which was the responsibility of a different crew. He called this method his “on-site factory.” Hiring workers as subcontractors, Levitt circumvented the unions, paying workers by the unit rather than the hour and speeding production to a completion rate of thirty houses a day. He favored skilled laborers over craftsmen and used prefabricated elements wherever possible; nonetheless, the Levittown homes, which sold for under $8,000, included appliances such as washers and dryers, refrigerators, and even television sets.

By the time the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) withdrew its support from rental housing in 1948, to encourage home ownership among the working class, Levittown consisted of 4,000 houses. To fund the next phase, Levitt sold most of the houses to his tenants. The remainder were sold, along with his management company, to a nonprofit organization in Pennsylvania (a private school) to treat his income from the development as a capital gain rather than the more highly taxed income from rents.

The 1949–1951 models, built only for sale, had a new exterior with the same concrete slabs, four rooms and bath, and expansion attics that could be turned into additional bedrooms. These ranch-style houses sold faster than Levitt’s crews could build them. In 1952 Levittown comprised 17,447 houses with a community center, nine swimming pools, seven village greens, and land set aside for houses of worship.

Levittown was severely criticized for its mass-produced houses, the conformity of the lifestyle they imposed, and the resulting influx of working-class families into formerly middle-class suburbs. Levitt’s racially covenanted deeds—which conformed to the FHA standards of the times—were also controversial. It was his policy not to sell houses to blacks, which he explained by saying that if a black family bought a house at one of his Levittown developments, this would lead to a decrease in purchases by white families. He told the Saturday Evening Post in 1954, “As a company, our position is simply this: we can solve a housing problem, or we can solve a racial problem. But we cannot combine the two.”

Levitt also built Levittowns in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where, still stinging from the criticism of the first Levittown, he varied the designs and aimed for a more affluent market. After cancer surgery in 1959, Levitt went on to build in Maryland and Puerto Rico as well as Las Vegas and Chicago. In 1963 he returned to Long Island to build another series of mid-priced developments in Suffolk County.

Levitt’s French branch, Levitt-France, built Chez Levitt outside of Paris in 1964 after the French government eased mortgage regulations. As with the early Manhasset developments, Chez Levitt included a former chateau converted to a community center, a park, tennis courts, and a swimming pool. But the French effort was less successful than its American prototype, in part because European purchasers demanded amenities that added considerably to the sale price.

In 1968 he sold Levitt and Sons to International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) for $92 million in stock. Levitt and Sons became the Levitt Corporation, with Levitt as a consultant. Under the terms of the agreement, Levitt could not build in the United States for ten years. Doing business as Levitt Industries, Inc., Levitt invested in other fields, including an engine factory in Israel and a chain of drugstores in New England. He also experimented with “panelization,” a form of prefabrication in which house walls were wired, plumbed, and painted in the factory for assembly at the site. His projects were heavily leveraged, using ITT stock as collateral. In 1972 a major downturn in construction caused financial problems for ITT, and Levitt’s ITT stock fell, eventually losing more than 90 percent of its value. In 1974 ITT was ordered to divest some of its holdings, including Levitt Corporation, which languished in receivership until 1978, when it was sold to Starrett Housing Corporation.

After being invited to develop housing in Nigeria in 1977, Levitt withdrew from the project, believing that it would fail, probably because of the instability of Nigeria’s government and its economy. Ironically, he then turned his attention to what would become a far more volatile foreign market. In 1977 he began a project of 11,600 garden apartments outside Tehran, Iran. With the shah’s overthrow in 1979, Levitt was deported and the project halted. He unsuccessfully sued the Iranian government for $34 million in lost revenues.

When his agreement to abstain from building in the United States expired in 1977, Levitt formed International Community Corporation and announced a new Levittown to be built near Orlando, Florida. Starrett immediately sued Levitt for infringing on its rights to the Levittown credentials. As a result, Levitt was forbidden to use any references to Levittown or its history in advertising and publicity. He subsequently changed the development’s name to Williamsburg. The Williamsburg project ran into serious problems when roof tiles, purchased from Australia, began to leak. Complaints to Orange County officials resulted in a 1980 moratorium on building permits, pending repairs to the houses. As the first 1,000 of the planned 9,000 dwellings at Williamsburg reached completion in 1981, Levitt’s already tenuous finances headed toward legal disaster. He was charged with illegally transferring millions of dollars from the family’s tax-exempt foundation (established by his father in 1949) between 1974 and 1980, and with misleading the foundation’s board of directors. The court ordered him to pay $10 million in punitive damages and $4 million in interest. In 1987 Levitt resigned from the foundation.

From 1982 through 1986, Levitt, no longer considered a good banking risk, kept his business alive by moving money from project to project. He used sizable deposits on projected houses to build units for which money had already been paid. In 1984 the Williamsburg developments failed amid accusations that he had transferred business funds to personal needs. Undaunted, Levitt announced a third Florida project on 7,000 acres outside Orlando. Poinciana Park’s 26,000 houses promised to become the world’s largest development.

In 1985 Levitt’s silent partner, Old Court Savings and Loan, failed. The Maryland bank was placed in receivership, curtailing Levitt’s access to financing. The receiver determined that continued association with Levitt’s name and lost credibility would negatively impact the Poinciana Park project’s marketability, but Levitt continued to advertise the development. Fourteen months later, with no construction underway, more than 3,000 deposits had been received. Despite the legal ban on promotion of his association with Levittown, the reputation of his earlier developments had drawn a stream of deposits.

In 1986 Levitt was forced to liquidate all of his assets, including his Mill Neck estate on Long Island’s north shore, to pay his creditors. Many of these were contractors, now on the brink of bankruptcy, who had worked with him since his Levittown years. The Orlando Williamsburg property was sold with only 2,000 of the proposed units built, and the Tampa Williamsburg development was foreclosed with only 124 of its proposed 4,500 houses completed.

In 1987 Levitt was found guilty of using deposit money to fund the advertising and overhead expenses for the projects. Unable to repay $12 million to Old Court Savings and Loan, he lost the Poinciana property. New York’s attorney general sued for the return of the deposits to dissatisfied New Yorkers and barred Levitt from selling houses in the state. Levitt settled the suit in 1987, agreeing to repay the foundation $11 million, of which only $7.7 million had been paid by 1990, when he unsuccessfully requested relief from the court. He also returned $434,000 in deposits. Levitt was accused of having used additional millions from the foundation to pay his Florida debts.

Still planning to rebuild his business, Levitt died of kidney failure at age eighty-six in Manhasset’s North Shore University Hospital, a clinic funded by his foundation during the good years. He is buried in Mount Ararat Cemetery in North Lindenhurst, Long Island. His last known residence was a rented condominium.

William Levitt has been alternately credited with inventing the American suburb and blamed for suburban sprawl. Neither view is entirely accurate: he was a businessman who provided what the market demanded. His skill was in clever adaptation of the ideas of others, innovations suited to the business climate of a time and place. Despite the poor judgment of his later years, for most of his career he managed to earn handsome profits, and in turn his foundation generously funded charitable causes. Throughout his troubled years, Levitt returned to Levittown and the affordable houses he had provided for young families. He strove to recapture his early success with venture after venture. Neither the heroic figure of his early years nor the villain of his later ones, Levitt was an entrepreneur for whom the times and the rules of the game had changed.

Levitt’s clippings files, along with a number of photographs and maps of his developments, are on deposit in the Long Island Studies Institute at Hofstra University. The best sources of information about him can be found in books and dissertations about his early communities. John Liell’s Levittown: A Study in Community Planning and Development (1952) was the first serious study of the Long Island Levittown. Herbert Gans mounted a spirited defense of Levitt and his Levittowns in The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (1967), and Jean Buhr’s The Meaning of Levittown (1988) addressed the social phenomenon of the postwar subdivision. In Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown, Barbara Kelly examines the transition of Levittown from working-class to middle-class housing. A profile of Levitt at the height of his success can be found in Current Biography (1956). Numerous articles on Levitt appeared in Newsday over the years, and obituaries are in the New York Times, New York Post, and Newsday (all 30 Jan. 1994).

Barbara M. Kelly