He Was the Most Famous Builder Ever in American Residential Construction

A new book on the man behind Levittown shows how William Levitt changed the way the country builds new homes. 

Over a career spanning decades and stretching from the former potato fields on Long Island to as far away as France, William Levitt claims to have built 140,000 new homes, becoming the Henry Ford of housing. Author Edward Berenson, in his new book, “Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia,” says these practices and techniques could be used to address America’s chronic housing shortage today if they were put into wider use. 

Levitt’s genius, Mr. Berenson writes, “was to reduce the cost of homes at a crucial point in US history by quickly and dramatically increasing the supply.” The Wall Street Journal, in its review of the book, said it “reads like a how-to manual for reversing America’s housing woes.”

Berenson wrote that Levitt treated home building as a form of manufacturing, creating economies of scale with vertical integration, mechanization and assembly lines. Levitt’s company, he wrote, “bought three million linear feet of trees in northern California and established its own lumber mill” and worked with specialized companies to make stairways, cabinets and windows, agreeing to take 100 percent of their production.

Levitt’s assembly line included cement trucks pouring foundations, crews putting in piping and then construction workers assembling framing, roofing and even installing insulation. In less than four years, Levitt built 17,447 houses in that first Levittown, which was subsequently followed by other developments in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Puerto Rico and even France. 

Levitt came under criticism later for his efforts to keep his communities restricted to whites only, barring Blacks and Jews, while some architectural writers criticized the blandness of the homes he built. Still, Berenson, a professor of history at New York University, defends what Levitt did, noting that “the overwhelming majority of those who bought his houses thought they were just fine and considered the ability to own them a small miracle.” Berenson had first-hand knowledge of the subject: he grew up in a Levittown house.

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