Уильям Левитт: Пионер пригородного строительства и расовая сегрегация

American real estate developer and suburbia pioneer

William Jaird Levitt (February 11, 1907 – January 28, 1994) was an American real estate developer and housing pioneer. As president of Levitt & Sons, he is widely credited as the father of modern American suburbia. In 1998 he was named one of Time Magazine's "100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century." While Levitt is credited as being the "father of Suburban development" with the creation of Levittown, NY, this township was founded with overtly racist policies at the behest of Levitt. African Americans or any other minority was prohibited from purchasing or otherwise settling in Levittown, setting the stage for other suburban towns nationwide. Levitt wrote [in the Levittown standard lease, clause 25, 1947]
" Levittown homes must not be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race."

Levitt was born in 1907 to a Jewish family in Brooklyn. His generation was the second since emigrating from Russia and Austria; the paternal grandparents who immigrated to the United States had been a rabbi grandfather from Russia and a grandmother from Austria Germany. His father was Abraham Levitt, a Brooklyn born real estate attorney and part time investor; his mother was Pauline Biederman. A younger brother, Alfred, was born when William was five years old. William received a public school education at Public School 44 and Boys High School. Even before returning from the war, Levitt experimented with mass housing projects, building a 1,600 home community in Norfolk, Virginia, which was not a success and housing units remained unsold in 1950. Levitt & Sons' first successful housing development was located on almost 20 square miles (52 km2) of land near Hempstead, Long Island and was named Levittown. The assembly line construction method enabled Levitt to build more efficiently than other developers at the time, with teams of specialized workers following each other from house to house to complete incremental steps in the construction. In 1952, people started buying over 17,000 Levitt built homes in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In addition, the company built Willingboro, New Jersey, which still has street names such as Levitt Parkway. During the late 1950s, Levitt and Sons constructed "Belair at Bowie" in Bowie, Maryland. William had taken control of Levitt & Sons in 1954 In the early 1960s, the company built a 5,000 house community in north central New Jersey called Strathmore at Matawan.

By the late 1960s, Levitt had become one of the richest men in America, with a fortune estimated in excess of $100 million. He lived in a lavish 30 room mansion on his "La Coline" estate in Mill Neck, New York, and spent much of his time on La Belle Simone, his 237 feet (72 m) yacht named after his third wife.

Levitt refused to integrate his developments. The Jewish Levitt barred Jews from Strathmore, his first pre Levittown development on Long Island in New York, and he refused to sell his homes to African Americans. His sales contracts also forbade the resale of properties to blacks through restrictive covenants, although in 1957 a Jewish couple resold their house to the first black family to live in a Levitt home. Levitt's all white policies also led to civil rights protests in Bowie, Maryland in 1963. The 2003 PBS series Race: The Power of an Illusion, by California Newsreel, features Levittown and nearby Roosevelt in documenting systemic racism in the development of the early suburbs. Levitt has been criticized for his racially discriminatory policies when providing housing, which were especially discriminatory to African Americans, Jews, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans and Native Americans.

After he had built over 140,000 houses around the world, then 60 year old Levitt sold the company to ITT for $92 million ($92.0 in 1967 is equivalent to about <calculated amount> in recent years million today) in July 1967, of which $62 million was in the form of ITT stock. ITT made Levitt president of the renamed Levitt Corp., with a non compete clause where Levitt could not found or be employed by another United States home building company for ten years. Levitt remained president under ITT until 1972. During that time he led the subsidiary's development of housing projects in Palm Coast, Florida; Richmond, Virginia; and Fairfax, Virginia.