Word: levitt
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Money Itch. William Jaird Levitt never planned to be a builder; he just drifted into it. Born in Brooklyn in 1907, he grew up in an argumentative family, and in that atmosphere his self-confidence waxed mightily. His father, Abraham, was a lawyer who used to spend summer nights lecturing to Bill and his younger brother Alfred on everything from art to the Dodgers. Bill, the family extravert, liked the baseball lectures; Alfred, shy and retiring, preferred those...
...they laid long, roadlike strips of concrete for foundations, then erected walls and roofs over them to form 1,600 squat houses that were little more than shacks. The development was a flop and about 230 of the units are now empty. More successful were 757 houses the Levitts built in Norfolk for the Navy. This success convinced them that low-priced houses could be profitably mass-produced. But the idea was temporarily shelved in 1943, when Bill Levitt joined the Seabees as a lieutenant...
...Levitt & Sons built about 1,000 houses in 1946 while quietly picking up property for their Levittown project. Before the war, the land cost only $300 an acre; now it has soared to $3,600. "The potato farmers," says Bill Levitt, "got rich...
...Steps. There is no secret to mass-producing houses, says Bill Levitt. It is merely "size plus organization." But Bill and Alfred Levitt worked out a new kind of organization for housebuilders...
...building industry, shot through with featherbedding union practices, they had another advantage: neither the subcontractors nor Levitt's organization is unionized and there has been no great pressure from unions. Legend has it that once, when unionists were picketing Levittown, one of the pickets left the line to look at a house. He got so interested he ended by buying one. Says Bill Levitt: "I'm not against unions. I just think we can build houses faster without them...