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.