How Did Levitt Home Build A House?

After the War people were looking forward to the transition from a wartime economy to one of peace. Now, items that had not been available for purchase in almost a decade would now be for sale once more. One of the things that was in the highest demand was housing. The housing market was huge. So many people were forced to be living in homes with their relatives, or in trailers, or anything they could find. Stories tell of people living in modified train cars, shacks, virtually anything, circulated. The government decided to take action, creating a new construction bill for five million homes. The Federal housing Administration was in charge of taking the money granted towards these projects and allocating it towards the construction of new houses. The
Levitt family had the biggest impact on postwar housing.
This family decided that in order to solve the housing problem, and in order to make the most profit, construction needed to be made more efficient. They created “Levittowns”, where every house was set up on a cookie cutter plot, and every house was identical to the others. In this way, they could minimize the amount of time required to make a new house, and they could sell them in large quantities. They also set up an assembly line technique of assembling houses in parts. Each man had his own job, and many parts of the house were constructed previously and then brought on site to be put up. The Levitt family also put verticle integration to use, by making their own concrete, their own lumber, etc. Through all of this, they were able to build affordable houses both quickly and cheaply. Once completed, these homes were available for sale to Vets and their
families. Levittown consisted of more than 17,400 single family homes, and 82,000 residents. What appealed to people the most was that they could get a good sized, standard home and yard for cheap, for Levittown houses were around $1,500 less than competitors. Also, people liked the idea of being in a community with lots of other families with a similar demographic to their own. They majority of families in these towns were young and white, with lots of children. Eventually, schools, and parks, and other great utilities and services emerged to meet the needs of these communities that were located outside the city. Now, people wanted to move to the suburbs because it of their huge success. Suburbs were successful, and soon everyone wanted to live in them. One of the main problems that arose was segregation. At the start, Levittown was only for white residents. The communities within the town were all comprised of middle class white families. Virtually no black families were able to get housing in these suburbs. Once they could, however, they were placed in poor neighbor hoods, and once they began to settle into an area, the whites moved out and eventually, the area became overrun by all kinds of trouble. Crime like drug trafficking and prostitution popped up, and the buildings, homes, and schools became run down and no own seemed interested in trying to fix them up. Black families were therefore stuck with second rate living spaces compared to the ever improving communities and homes for white people. Blacks were isolated by being forced to live in and form their own poor communities. It was said that the American dream was to buy a house in the suburbs, send one’s kids to a good school, and have a yard with grass, but for black people and other poor minorities, they got to watch the value of their investment decline as the whites moved out. They did not get to live out this dream for they were forced into bad living conditions. This was a major problem in America during the 1950s, something that would not change until the end of the civil rights movement.