Talk:William Levitt

Untitled

Hey, for a new user, this is a great article. Good job! Adam Conover 07:36, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)

split article

It seems like this is mostly about Levitt & Sons. Perhaps Levitt & Sons should be broken out into a separate article. Several other pages reference it. Toddstreat1 03:08, 15 June 2007 (UTC) No consensus-- Disagree. Mrdthree (talk) 13:43, 16 July 2009 (UTC)

Unsourced Quote

Moving quote unsourced since June to here. If we can find a source, let's move it back.

Quotes

• "No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do." (1948)

Toddstreat1 05:08, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

From various citations on the web, it seems he said this in an interview published in 1948 in Harper's Magazine. Someone with access to back issues should be able to find it. -- Margin1522 (talk) 17:10, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

William Levitt the Racist

1947: Housing [Municipal Code] William Levitt, the developer of the nation's first modern-day suburb of tract housing in Long Island, NY, believed that segregation was good for business and used restrictive covenants to maintain racial homogeneity. Following the Federal Housing Administration's lead which recommended against "inharmonious racial or nationality groups," he used the following covenant in 1947 to create a segregated community:

The tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race. But the employment and maintenance of other than Caucasian domestic servants shall be permitted. Although Levitt eliminated the racial covenants after the 1948 Supreme Court decision declaring such provisions as "unenforceable and contrary to public policy," he continued to practice discrimination in his housing developments in New Jersey and Maryland. The original Levittown never had more than a handful of black families well into the 1980s, and remains 97 percent white today. Ironically, though Levitt was the grandson of a rabbi, he also agreed to use restrictive covenants to ban Jews from his early developments. In his mind, it was strictly business. (LI History)

Cited: http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/scripts/jimcrow/lawsoutside.cgi?state=New York —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.11.34.109 (talk) 15:33, 18 April 2010 (UTC)

Irrelevant information about Levitt and Sons, other changes

I would like to discuss several things blanket reverted by User:Magnolia677.

Irrelevant text removed

This is all mostly irrelevant and was moved, in some form, to Levitt & Sons:

Levitt & Sons built their first huge housing development near Hempstead, Long Island and named it Levittown. Residents started moving into Levittown, New York in 1947. Levitt's innovation in creating this planned community was to build the houses in the manner of an assembly line,[9] where specialized workers with a specific task moved from house to house as they were constructed en masse. While William Levitt was in Hawaii, his father took over as company president and planned to build a community of 6,000 low-priced homes in Nassau County, much larger than any other U.S. development. The company bought 1,000 acres of potato farms on Long Island. On July 1, 1947, Levitt broke ground on the $50 million development, Levittown, which ultimately included 17,000 homes on 7.3 square miles of land. Alfred Levitt 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 seventh-of-an-acre lot. They had 750 square feet with two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen, an unfinished second floor and no garage.

To mass produce the houses, the company broke the construction process down into 27 operations. Specialized teams repeated each operation at each building site. Twenty acres formed an assembly point, where cement was mixed and lumber cut. Trucks delivered parts and material to homesites placed 60 feet apart. Then carpenters, tilers, painters and roofers arrived in sequence. One team used white paint, another red. One worker's only duty was to bolt washing machines to floors. The Levitts built up to 180 houses a week when most builders were constructing four or five homes a year.

Levitt revolutionized the home construction industry by sifting through outdated building codes and union rules and using new technologies to get quality building jobs completed quickly and cheaply. To save money on lumber, the Levitts bought forests and built a sawmill in Oregon. They purchased appliances directly from the manufacturer, cutting out the middleman. They even made their own nails.

The mass production methods kept costs so low that in the first years the houses sold for $7,990, a price that still allowed a profit of about $1,000. (In the late 1990s they sold for about $155,000.) When the Levitt homes went on the market in March 1949, eager buyers lined up to purchase them. On the first day, Levitt sold 1,400 homes. They could be bought for a $58 downpayment, and included a free washing machine and television. The success of Levittown depended on huge government assistance. The Federal Housing Administration guaranteed the loans that banks made to builders. The Veterans Administration provided buyers with low-interest mortgages to purchase those houses, thus the risk to the lenders was small.

Levitt was the cover story in TIME Magazine for July 3, 1950, with the tag line "For Sale: a new way of life."[10]

At the helm of Levitt & Sons, Levitt went on to plan and build other communities on the East Coast in the 1950s and 1960s. Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which saw its first residents in 1952, in a community that ultimately numbered more than 17,000 homes. Willingboro, New Jersey, was originally built as a Levittown, and bears several Levittown-specific street names such as Levitt Parkway. During the late 1950s, Levitt and Sons developed the community known as "Belair at Bowie," in Bowie, Maryland. In the early 1960s, the company built a 5,000-house community in north central New Jersey called Strathmore-at-Matawan.

I only kept the few texts that were actually relevant to William himself, such as his role in the development of Levittown, NY (as opposed to his company's); his appearance on Time Magazine; and his other community.

It was also a copyvio; see [1], where this "removed section" was relocated. In fact, almost everything from "While William Levitt was in Hawaii" to "the risk to the lenders was small" was plagiarized. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 100.12.206.17 (talk) 14:27, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Citations in the lead

The sentence in the lead:

was among Time Magazine's: 100 Most Influential People of the 20th century.

was moved down to the appropriate section per WP:CITELEAD.

Other fixes

• Categories have to be alphabetized.
• Some cleanup of links (like U. S. Government to United States government), some addition of links that weren't there
• Tone changes. The previous version had a tone of unnecessary embellishment
• Removal of urls in "publisher" field, which causes errors.
• Removal of deprecated persondata
• Deleted image removed
• Some miscellaneous changes that were not "removal" and not unconstructive

I would like to know why these changes are being removed without good reason. The edit summary "This was sourced material" is not pertinent here, as there were 15 sources then, and there is the same number now. "It appeared relevant" is not true, but I don't think that a cursory glance can reveal that in depth. 100.12.206.17 (talk) 13:54, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Willingboro, NJ mostly black today

Willingboro Township, New Jersey is now 70.5% African-American, as of the 2020 census, despite Levitt's efforts to exclude that ethnicity. Bill S. (talk) 16:10, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

Levitt-Pickman Film Corp.

Levitt's film corporation should be included in his Wikipedia page. In 1971, Levitt joined Jerry Pickman to form Levitt-Pickman Film Corp., which specialized in offbeat and specialty product, ranging from Fellini’s “The Clowns” to Andy Warhol’s “Heat” and a telepic, “The Groove Tube.” Abazapa13 (talk) 17:19, 25 January 2024 (UTC)