Edward Berenson Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia Yale University Press 424 pages, 6 x 9 inches ISBN: 978-0300259544
Edward Berenson
On Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia
Interview of
December 18, 2025
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In a nutshell
Perfect Communities tells the story of Levittown, America’s iconic postwar suburb. It’s really the story of Levittowns, plural, because there were four in the United States, eight in France, and one each in Spain and Puerto Rico. Not all were called “Levittown”—the French developments sported pretentious names—but they all were the brainchild of William J. (Bill) Levitt, who in the 1950s became the largest, wealthiest homebuilder in the world
The story begins in the potato fields of western Long Island, where a parasite and other problems were driving farmers out of business. Many were desperate to unload their unproductive lands, and Levitt was eager to snap them up. His company, Levitt & Sons, had begun building homes on Long Island in 1929, and he wanted to expand his operations after the war. He understood, as few other homebuilders did, that millions of returning GIs and their families had no place to live. Homebuilding had slowed to a snail’s pace during the Great Depression and Second World War, causing a dire postwar shortage of dwellings.
By 1947, six million people had squeezed in with relatives and friends, taking up residence in basements, garages, attics, and barns. In Chicago, trolley cars were sold as homes, and an Omaha newspaper ad read, “Big Ice Box, 7-17 feet could be fixed up to live in.” A 1947 Senate committee report noted that returning veterans were forced to live in “hovels…with no water available, heating facilities so bad that bottled drinks will freeze in the same room with a large stove, no sanitary toilet facilities…no sinks, cardboard window panes and paper walls.” The authors mostly had white Americans in mind; for African Americans, the housing situation had been dire long before 1945.
Levitt understood not only that more housing was needed—and fast—but also that new housing would have to be affordable for young families with modest incomes. Before and during the war, he and a few other builders, encouraged by the Federal Housing Administration, a New Deal agency, had figured out how, in theory, to mass produce basic houses at reasonable cost. After the war, Levitt turned mass production into a high art by dividing the homebuilding process into twenty-six discrete steps and organizing his workers into twenty-six teams, each responsible for one of those steps.
To simplify things and lower costs, he got rid of basements, laundry rooms, dining rooms, garages, and even driveways. Each house was essentially the same, except for different colors and a few other details. The floor plans were identical: kitchen and living room in front, two bedrooms in back for a grand total of 750 square feet. An unfinished attic made space for two more bedrooms upstairs. There were no hallways or nooks and crannies to take up precious space. With one bedroom for mom and dad and the other for the kids, the Levitt house, journalists said, was the best method of birth control.
The original Levittown house
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The wide angle
A key point of the book is to show that it was once possible to build affordable housing on an enormous scale, and that we can still learn something from what Bill Levitt accomplished decades ago. Although elite writers and cultural figures scorned the Levitt house as “ticky-tacky little boxes, all the same,” as a famous Pete Seeger song put it, many tens of thousands of people, here and abroad, liked them just fine.
The demand for a Levitt house, ignited in 1947, took nearly three decades to subside. He sold 17,447 houses in Levittown, NY; 17,337 in Levittown, PA; 11,000 in Levittown, NJ; 9,000 in Bowie-Belair near Washington, D.C.; 11,000 in Levittown, Puerto Rico, six miles from Old San Juan; and 3,000 in the suburbs of Paris, France. Levitt built each of these communities in just a few years, having created each one from scratch. He had to install sewers, grade the land, build thousands of miles of streets, put in street lights and sidewalks, construct dozens of schools, and leave room for churches. Because Levitt saw his Levittowns as communities, not just collections of houses, he added swimming pools, ball fields, shopping centers, and other amenities.
For all his successes and accomplishments, Levitt had an Achilles heel: racial discrimination. He refused to sell or rent his homes to African Americans, helping to ensure that most US suburbs would remain racially segregated. Denied homeownership, many African Americans would not be able to take advantage of what for most white American families was their main source of wealth—equity in their home. Those African Americans who succeeded in buying a suburban home, generally in all-Black or mostly-Black developments, found that the value of their homes appreciated more slowly than the homes of their white counterparts.
In August 1957, racial discrimination erupted into violence. When Daisy and Bill Myers became the first African Americans to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, having bought a resale home there (Levitt was powerless to prevent this), hundreds of their neighbors and other Levittowners mobilized to force them out. Rocks crashed through their picture windows, and demonstrators amassed menacingly outside. Bill and Daisy and their three children faced harassment day and night, and they endured five cross burnings, racial epithets, and KKK symbols. The violence and harassment ceased only when the state police imposed order and the Pennsylvania governor and attorney general intervened. The Myerses never felt welcomed in Levittown and left after four years.
So why did I want to tell this particular story and write about the Levittown phenomenon in general? I grew up in Levittown, PA, and although I was too young in 1957 to follow the Myers saga, my parents were involved in defending the family, and they told me about it later on. What happened to the Myers didn’t affect me or my friends, all of us white, although otherwise very diverse—Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Poles, Italians, Germans, working class and middle class, all jumbled together. For us, it was a great place to be a kid.
Whatever age you were, dozens of neighbor kids were the same age as you. Once we turned 10, we were allowed to ride our bikes to the nearest pool—there were five, all told—and we played touch football in the street and baseball in our backyard. The elementary school, with its playing fields and cement walls for stickball, was a half-block away. There was very little crime, and, as adolescents and teenagers, we had far more freedom than young people do today. There was also far more social mobility then than now. Several of my friends’ fathers were steelworkers without high school diplomas; their sons and daughters all finished school, and many went to college. Some stayed in Levittown or returned there as adults; many moved away. A Facebook group of current and former Levittowners shows that people remain attached to the place.
A close-up
There are wonderful pictures sprinkled throughout the book, and I’d love for bookstore browsers to take a look. They’ll see pictures of people camped out overnight in the frigid cold, desperate to snare a Levitt house when the sales office opened in the morning. There weren’t nearly enough of the Little Boxes—original price, $6,990—to go around. Paging further into the book, browsers will find pictures of rows of houses going up simultaneously; pictures of throngs of people waiting in line to troop through a model Levitt home; pictures of a police officer felled by a rock thrown at the Myerses house; pictures of the red-tile roofed French version of the Levitt house and the tropical Puerto Rican one; pictures of Bill Levitt with his third (trophy) wife posed in front of their yacht, the third largest in the world. And, on the back flap, a picture of the four-year-old me with my mom in front of our new Levittown house, its front yard still a mound of dirt.
Browsers will get a feel for popularity of the original Levitt homes on page 1 of the book. I quote a headline from Newsday, the premier Long Island newspaper, spotlighting the “home rush” to get into Levittown. It was “a scene reminiscent of the storming of the gates of Versailles and the Yukon gold rush.”
Lastly
The Levittown legacy is anything but straightforward. It can’t be reduced to a story of racial exclusion, of heroic homebuilding for returning veterans, of the sad architecture of “little boxes,” or to any one narrative. Each of those stories is true, but none paints the whole picture. Nor can the contradictions among them be satisfactorily resolved. Levitt truly did create unprecedented opportunities for young families to become homeowners and build a measure of family wealth, but white opportunities were premised on the exclusion of African Americans from those same possibilities. Their exclusion left a terrible legacy but also a moral ambiguity. Most of the white families that took advantage of the Levittowns did so because they could afford nothing else, and because it cost less to buy there than to rent in nearby New York, Philadelphia, or Washington. D.C. (and later, in Paris and San Juan). Most of Levitt’s white buyers weren’t consciously trying to avoid having Black neighbors, although some clearly were. Still, the white people who bought into Levittown must have been aware that Blacks were barred, and if living in a segregated community was an issue for them, apparently it was more important that the price was right. The “pure” thing to do would have been to reject Levitt’s racism and refuse to buy homes there, and some did so. But most Levittowners didn’t see themselves as beneficiaries of an undeserved privilege, the happenstance of being white. Many would come to understand this uncomfortable fact only later in life, and some would work for the integration of African Americans into their communities.
Although the FHA tacitly, and sometimes explicitly, endorsed Levitt’s racist policies and the courts ratified them for than a decade, Levitt’s exclusions were controversial and ultimately overturned, at least as a matter of law. Thanks to a series of court rulings, Levittown, New Jersey, became an integrated community, from which most whites eventually fled. Bowie, Maryland, however, became more racially integrated than most US suburbs and has stayed that way. But the two original Levittowns, in New York and Pennsylvania, remain almost entirely white, making the Levitt legacy there enduringly unfair.
What also endures of the Levitt legacy is its role in creating our current shortage of affordable housing. When the Levittowns were going up, there was ample land within striking distance of major East Coast cities, so Levitt could surround each house with no less than 6,000 square feet of grass and shrubs. But he used up all the available space, and then zoning laws locked in the house-and-yard, making denser housing impossible. Without greater density, we’ll be unable to build the new housing we desperately need. So, Levitt’s solution to the postwar housing crisis has played a major role in creating the housing crisis facing us today.
