Levittown Founder

William Jaird Levitt -- Levittown Founder

Introduction

After the world war II, the United States faced a severe baby boom during 1946 to 1964 where there were about 79 million babies born in that time period. This was a direct result of the war where the soldiers would get married in order to get that $50 more which was provided to married servicemen. Also, the war made the couples make faster decision on having a child because the soldiers might not come back and the couple would want to have a baby together. The increase in the size of families in a huge level made people want a bigger house to live. But there weren’t any houses on sale because most of them were also increasing their families and needed the bigger house. As a result, there

After returning from the war he understood quickly that there was a lack of affordable housing for the returning veterans which was created mainly due to baby boom. Levitt had experimented on different techniques of mass housing projects even before the war which was not a very much success. But after the war and in the middle of the affordable housing crisis, the assembly line construction method allowed the success of the Levittown concept. A lot of these techniques is believed to have come from William Levitt when he was in the Navy. “The assembly line construction method allowed Levittown to be constructed more efficiently than other developments at the time, with teams of specialized workers following each other from house to house to complete incremental steps in the construction.” In 1946, the first major concept of Levittown was laid where Levitt bought about 4,000 acres of potato farms and started construction of the biggest private housing project in American history. The project was done in Hempstead, Long Island which was done in a very different method in order to achieve a faster way of house construction, while still making it very cost effective and efficient. The construction was divided into 27 different steps defined between the first laying the foundation to cleaning the house at the end of the construction. Levitt tried to reduce the cost by using different techniques like cutting the middleman to get basic requirements to build a house due to which he was able to use the latest technology to do the construction faster. The most houses they made in a day was 30 houses or 150 houses per week which was at July of