W. Levitt; Mass-Produced Suburbia With Levittowns

William J. Levitt, the prophetic builder whose inexpensive, nearly identical, mass-produced houses set Americans on the road to suburbia, died Friday night.

Associated Press said he was 86 and had been undergoing treatment for a progressive kidney disease when he died in a hospital in Manhasset, Long Island.

It was on Long Island that his Levittowns--planned communities surrounded by shopping, swimming pools and playgrounds--established him as America’s foremost builder.

Beginning in 1947, Levitt & Sons constructed more than 17,000 moderately priced homes for about $8,000 each. Most were repetitive boxes of 800 square feet set side by side, but they enabled city dwellers to escape the growing inhospitality of New York for a safer life on tree-shaded streets.

“William Levitt was to suburbs as Henry Ford was to the auto,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, author of “Crabgrass Frontier,” a history of American suburbanization. “Neither one of them invented it. Neither one of them made any major contribution to the technology or the idea, but both of them popularized it, both of them did it in a bigger way than anyone had done it before.”

Levitt’s methods emulated Ford’s mass production innovations, enabling him to build three dozen homes in a day.

“What it amounted to,” he once said in an interview, “was a reversal of the Detroit (assembly) line. There the cars moved while the workers stayed at their stations. In our case, it was the workers who moved, doing the same jobs at different locations. . . . No one had ever done that before.”

Desmond Ryan, executive director of a Better Long Island, said that the first Levittown almost wasn’t built.

He explained that Republicans on the Hempstead Long Island Town Board felt that an overnight suburb filled with New York City Democrats would unfavorably transform the political power structure.

“What they didn’t realize was that when you put young Democratic families into their own homes, they become Republicans,” Ryan said.

Levittown, which was built in the middle of a potato field, is now a mature community where people take enormous pride in their homes, Ryan said. Those homes--painted many times over to remove the drab colors that Levitt favored--sell for more than $100,000.

Levitt began as his father’s employee with Levitt & Sons in the years before World War II. The firm was headed by patriarch Abraham, an attorney, who got into the housing business because he had acquired land through mortgage foreclosures and built houses on it. William Levitt was the abrasive, confident businessman, while his more soft-spoken brother, Alfred, was a designer without formal architectural training who designed the Levittown homes.

In the 1930s, their homes were selling for $12,000 to $20,000 each. But when World War II began, the Levitts learned mass housing practices through a contract for 2,350 Navy rental units at Norfolk, Va. Just before the war ended, they began amassing farmland on Long Island and gathering the stockpile of building materials that was to become the first Levittown.

Despite his successes, the developer, who was named one of the 100 most important Americans of the 20th Century by Life magazine, fell on hard times in the late 1970s and ‘80s and was accused by New York state officials of looting millions of dollars from a charitable foundation.

New York Atty. Gen. Robert Abrams accused Levitt of mishandling the Levitt Foundation. Levitt agreed to pay $11 million in penalties in 1992, but according to a July, 1993, memo from Abrams’ office, the state was able to collect only $7.7 million.

Levitt was also accused by the Federal Elections Commission of making illegal contributions in 1986 to Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s (D-Del.) presidential campaign. The FEC, citing the developer’s advanced age and financial troubles, last month dropped its attempt to collect $39,000 in fines from him.

Newsday, in its obituary on Levitt, quoted one of his original Levittown tenants:

“He was a fair man, he really gave a lot, and it was quality,” said Gene DiGennaro, who still lives in the Levitt home he bought in Hicksville after the war. “We paid $7,995 and we still have a lot to show for it.”