William Levitt: A House Every 11 Minutes, Whites-Only Deeds and ITT Ruin

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William J. Levitt was born in Brooklyn in 1907 to a second-generation Jewish immigrant family. His father, real estate attorney Abraham Levitt, founded Levitt & Sons in 1929, and William left NYU to run the business while his brother Alfred designed custom homes on Long Island. Service in the Navy Seabees taught him rapid construction, and a 1,600-home project in Norfolk, Virginia, built with traditional methods, still had unsold units in 1950. In Hempstead, Long Island, he broke house building into 27 repeatable steps, poured concrete slabs instead of digging basements, sent non-union crews with spray paint guns from lot to lot, bought lumber and appliances direct and built his own nail factory. At peak the firm finished a house every 11 minutes. An $8,000 home could cost a veteran about $400 up front, or $1 down in some promotions, and Time put him on its cover in 1950.

Levitt's communities barred Black buyers through restrictive covenants in the deeds. In 1957 a Jewish couple in his Pennsylvania development resold to the first Black family there, sparking unrest, and in 1963 his Bowie, Maryland, project drew civil rights protests. The NAACP and ACLU opposed him, the FHA threatened to withhold financing, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his Willingboro case. In July 1967 he sold Levitt & Sons to ITT for $92 million, about $62 million in stock, with a 10-year non-compete, and ITT sidelined him. Later ventures failed, the ITT shares he pledged for loans fell 90 percent, a 1978 Prince George's County subdivision drew more than 2,500 code violations in 122 homes, and he was accused of misappropriating millions from the Levitt Foundation. He died in Manhasset, New York, in January 1994.

• The firm built 17,000 homes in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, plus Willingboro, Bowie, Puerto Rico and France, more than 140,000 houses in all.
• By the late 1960s his fortune topped $100 million, with a 30-room Mill Neck estate and the 237-foot yacht La Belle Simone.
• At his earlier Strathmore development he initially used similar tactics to bar Jewish families.
• Prince George's County revoked his license to do business after the 1978 inspections.
• Time later named him one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century.