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Levitt & Sons
Levitt & Sons was a real estate development company founded by Abraham Levitt and later managed by his son William Levitt. The company built the town of Levittown, New York. The company's designs and building practices transformed the home building industry and altered the north eastern landscape of the United States with massive suburban communities.
Levitt & Sons was America's biggest home builder by 1951, and William Levitt was named one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. Historian Kenneth T. Jackson wrote of Levitt & Sons, "The family that had the greatest impact on postwar housing in the United States was Abraham Levitt and his sons, William and Alfred, who ultimately built more than 140,000 houses and turned a cottage industry into a major manufacturing process."
Abraham Levitt founded a real-estate development company near the start of the Great Depression. His son William became company president at the age of 22, handling the advertising, sales, and financing. Alfred Levitt, still a teenager, became vice president of design and drafted plans for the first Levitt house, a six bedroom, two bathroom Tudor style home that sold for over $14,000 in 1929 (roughly $263,000 today). The Levitts sold 600 of these upper-middle-class homes, part of the Strathmore project, in four years during the Great Depression.
William earned a reputation as the person to see for high-end, custom homes on the North Shore of New York's Long Island, called the Gold Coast. Prior to World War II, Levitt & Sons built mostly upscale housing on and around Long Island. During the 1930s, they built the North Strathmore community at Manhasset, New York, on the former Onderdonk farm. The North Strathmore homes sold for $9,100 to $18,500. The Levitts built another 1,200 homes in Manhasset, Great Neck, and Westchester County. Radio stars, prominent journalists, surgeons, business people, and lawyers bought the upscale Levitt houses. Levitt & Sons also built Strathmore at Roslyn a few years later, in the late 1940s.
After World War II, America's post-war prosperity and baby boom had created a crisis of affordable housing, especially for returning veterans. Levitt & Sons chose an area known as Island Trees near Hempstead, Long Island, as the site for a huge building project for housing these veterans. The company named it Levittown.
The community was planned to have 6,000 low-priced homes, making it much larger than any other U.S. development. The company bought 1,000 acres (400 ha) of potato farms on Long Island. On July 1, 1947, Levitt & Sons broke ground on the $50 million ($721 million today) development of Levittown, which ultimately included 17,500 homes on 7.3 square miles of land. Alfred created the mass production techniques and designed the homes and the layout of the development, with its curving streets. Abraham directed the landscaping, whose focus was two trees to each front yard, all planted exactly the same distance apart. William was the financier and promoter, who persuaded lawmakers to rewrite the laws that made Levittown possible. The houses, which were in the Cape Cod and ranch house styles, sat on a quarter-acre (0.09 ha) lot. They had 750 square feet (70 m2) with two bedrooms, a living room with a television and a kitchen with modern appliances, an unfinished second floor and no garage.
Levitt's innovation in creating this planned community was to build the houses in the manner of an assembly line. In normal assembly lines, the workers stay stationary and the product moves down the line; in Levitt's homebuilding assembly line, the product—the houses—stayed in place and specialized workers moved from house to house. The assembly line construction method allowed Levittown to be constructed more efficiently than other development at the time, with teams of specialized workers following each other from house to house to complete incremental steps in the construction. Levitt also reduced costs by freezing out union labor – a move which provoked picket lines – enabling him to use the latest technology, such as spray painting. He also cut out middlemen and purchased many items, including lumber and televisions, directly from manufacturers, as well as constructing his own factory to produce nails. The building of every house was reduced to 26 steps, and sub-contractors were responsible for each step.
During the project, Levitt & Sons emphasized speed, efficiency, and cost-effective construction; these methods led to a production rate of 30 houses a day by July 1948. The mass production of thousands of houses at virtually the same time allowed the company to sell them for as little as $8,000 each (equivalent to $115,350 in 2025), which, with the G.I. Bill and Federal housing subsidies, reduced the up-front cost of a house to many buyers to around $400.
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Levitt & Sons
Levitt & Sons was a real estate development company founded by Abraham Levitt and later managed by his son William Levitt. The company built the town of Levittown, New York. The company's designs and building practices transformed the home building industry and altered the north eastern landscape of the United States with massive suburban communities.
Levitt & Sons was America's biggest home builder by 1951, and William Levitt was named one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. Historian Kenneth T. Jackson wrote of Levitt & Sons, "The family that had the greatest impact on postwar housing in the United States was Abraham Levitt and his sons, William and Alfred, who ultimately built more than 140,000 houses and turned a cottage industry into a major manufacturing process."
Abraham Levitt founded a real-estate development company near the start of the Great Depression. His son William became company president at the age of 22, handling the advertising, sales, and financing. Alfred Levitt, still a teenager, became vice president of design and drafted plans for the first Levitt house, a six bedroom, two bathroom Tudor style home that sold for over $14,000 in 1929 (roughly $263,000 today). The Levitts sold 600 of these upper-middle-class homes, part of the Strathmore project, in four years during the Great Depression.
William earned a reputation as the person to see for high-end, custom homes on the North Shore of New York's Long Island, called the Gold Coast. Prior to World War II, Levitt & Sons built mostly upscale housing on and around Long Island. During the 1930s, they built the North Strathmore community at Manhasset, New York, on the former Onderdonk farm. The North Strathmore homes sold for $9,100 to $18,500. The Levitts built another 1,200 homes in Manhasset, Great Neck, and Westchester County. Radio stars, prominent journalists, surgeons, business people, and lawyers bought the upscale Levitt houses. Levitt & Sons also built Strathmore at Roslyn a few years later, in the late 1940s.
After World War II, America's post-war prosperity and baby boom had created a crisis of affordable housing, especially for returning veterans. Levitt & Sons chose an area known as Island Trees near Hempstead, Long Island, as the site for a huge building project for housing these veterans. The company named it Levittown.
The community was planned to have 6,000 low-priced homes, making it much larger than any other U.S. development. The company bought 1,000 acres (400 ha) of potato farms on Long Island. On July 1, 1947, Levitt & Sons broke ground on the $50 million ($721 million today) development of Levittown, which ultimately included 17,500 homes on 7.3 square miles of land. Alfred created the mass production techniques and designed the homes and the layout of the development, with its curving streets. Abraham directed the landscaping, whose focus was two trees to each front yard, all planted exactly the same distance apart. William was the financier and promoter, who persuaded lawmakers to rewrite the laws that made Levittown possible. The houses, which were in the Cape Cod and ranch house styles, sat on a quarter-acre (0.09 ha) lot. They had 750 square feet (70 m2) with two bedrooms, a living room with a television and a kitchen with modern appliances, an unfinished second floor and no garage.
Levitt's innovation in creating this planned community was to build the houses in the manner of an assembly line. In normal assembly lines, the workers stay stationary and the product moves down the line; in Levitt's homebuilding assembly line, the product—the houses—stayed in place and specialized workers moved from house to house. The assembly line construction method allowed Levittown to be constructed more efficiently than other development at the time, with teams of specialized workers following each other from house to house to complete incremental steps in the construction. Levitt also reduced costs by freezing out union labor – a move which provoked picket lines – enabling him to use the latest technology, such as spray painting. He also cut out middlemen and purchased many items, including lumber and televisions, directly from manufacturers, as well as constructing his own factory to produce nails. The building of every house was reduced to 26 steps, and sub-contractors were responsible for each step.
During the project, Levitt & Sons emphasized speed, efficiency, and cost-effective construction; these methods led to a production rate of 30 houses a day by July 1948. The mass production of thousands of houses at virtually the same time allowed the company to sell them for as little as $8,000 each (equivalent to $115,350 in 2025), which, with the G.I. Bill and Federal housing subsidies, reduced the up-front cost of a house to many buyers to around $400.