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 worldThe 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.