“Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain who build it” is a verse of a Psalm (127) that Levitt & Sons defied. In the period immediately after the Second World War, this company — consisting of Abraham Levitt and his sons William and Alfred — became the biggest homebuilders on the East Coast. The company’s prefabricated, mass-produced homes did more to ease the housing crisis than any rivals’, and the owners combined business shrewdness with enthusiastic FHA support. Levittowns suddenly appeared out of nowhere — on Long Island, then near Philadelphia, then in New Jersey and Maryland. There were even Levittowns in France and Puerto Rico. The similarity of the home designs and the familiarity of neighborhood settings led social critics as well as architecture experts to complain of the bland monotony of what Levitt & Sons had wrought.
Perhaps the only Americans who liked Levittowns lived in them — and Edward Berenson, a historian who grew up in one, has tapped into plenty of nostalgia among the interviewees, who recalled childhood blessings of harmony, comfort, and safety. Young families got their first chance of home ownership in suburbia — an opportunity that many never dared to hope to afford. In these communities, Berenson reports, there was a significant number of Catholics and Jews.
Everyone was also white — deliberately, often proudly. That is the downside of these “perfect communities”; and their key figure, Bill Levitt, was fiercely, unabashedly and cunningly dedicated to keeping Black families out. He did not always succeed — especially in New Jersey, where the relevant law against racial discrimination in Willingboro was vigorously enforced. But the first half of Berenson’s outstanding book admirably exposes the policy that enabled residents to build equity and secure a place in the middle class, while even Black professionals and their families remained trapped in ghettos. Levitt stubbornly believed that relieving the housing crisis and solving the “American dilemma” were utterly incompatible. White homeowners would leave as Black families arrived, making such neighborhoods unattractive except for other Blacks.
The final section of Perfect Communities is an astonishing tale of Bill Levitt’s collapse into delusion and destitution. On July 3, 1950, Time Magazine put him on its cover, when such recognition really mattered; and his flair for satisfying mass demand quickly and cheaply led to comparisons with Henry Ford. Levitt was seen as a national hero, and for several decades the adulation seemed deserved. But after selling his company to a conglomerate and becoming a philanthropist, Levitt had too much time on his hands and he floundered. Generous to Jewish and especially Israeli causes, married to a third wife who claimed to be a rabbi’s daughter (and who exhibited an enormous appetite for jewelry), Levitt eventually lost everything. So reckless were his investments that in 1994, when he died in the North Shore University Hospital — to which he had earlier donated vast sums — he had become a charity patient.
Stephen Whitfield is Professor of American Studies (Emeritus) at Brandeis University. He is the author of Learning on the Left: Political Profiles of Brandeis University (2020).
