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."
Early life and education
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-Hungary. 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 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.
Personal fortune
By the late 1960s, Levitt had become one of the richest men in America, with a fortune estimated in excess of $100 million (~$1 billion in 2024). 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 yacht named after his third wife.
Racial segregation
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.
Company sale
After he had built over 140,000 houses around the world, then 60-year-old Levitt sold the company to ITT for $92 million ($ 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.
Later years and death
After the restriction against Levitt moving to a new home building company in the United States expired, he was unable to repeat the success he had achieved with Levitt & Sons. He established a series of companies and joint ventures through the 1970s and 1980s which failed. The ITT stock he often used for collateral on these ventures lost 90% of its value, saddling him with great debt.
He was accused of misappropriation of funds from the charitable Levitt Foundation and agreed to repay $5 million, more than $5 million
Levitt died from kidney disease at a hospital in Manhasset, New York, on January 28, 1994, at the age of 86.
His nicknames included "The King of Suburbia" and "Inventor of the Suburb." At his height, when he was completing one suburban house every 11 minutes, Levitt compared his successes to those of Henry Ford's automobile assembly line. They had two sons, born in 1932 and 1944. The couple divorced in 1959, and, the same year, Levitt married his long-time mistress, Alice D. Kenny, an interior decorator at Levitt & Sons, and adopted her two daughters from a previous marriage. Ten years later, in 1969, Levitt divorced his second wife and married a French art dealer, Simone Korchin.