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.”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.