The scale of the project attracted national attention and made Levitt and Sons a household name. Unlike other builders who merely constructed houses, Levitt built entire communities.
The third Levittown, located just across the Delaware River in New Jersey, changed its name back to Willingboro in The opening of U. Jim Sheridan hardhat came to Levittown from a small mining town near Scranton. Lower Bucks was close to population centers Philadelphia and Trenton , improved highways including the Pennsylvania Turnpike and, best of all, jobs. Steel broke ground for its new Fairless Works Division along the western bank of the Delaware River in early Activist groups across the U.
In , the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NAACP sued federal mortgage agencies which had helped future homeowners finance the purchase of homes in the community, basing the suit on the denial of six black veterans from purchasing homes. Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who had successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education , represented the plaintiffs, but a Philadelphia court dismissed the suit after ruling that the federal agencies were not responsible for preventing housing discrimination.
Though the Levitts made it an unofficial policy not to sell homes to minorities, they could not legally prevent an existing homeowner from reselling their home to black buyers.
In , William and Daisy Myers, a black couple with young children, bought a house in Levittown, Pennsylvania from the former owners. The Myers family faced endless harassment as well as implicit and explicit threats of violence from other residents in the community, with little help from the local police to keep the mobs of angry racists from congregating outside their home day and night.
Through perseverance and courage, however, Myers outlasted their harassers and eventually succeeded in filing criminal charges against the worst members of the mob. The specter of communism was also heavily implicated in the Myers struggle, as members of both sides of the conflict hurled charges of socialism at their opponents. Indeed, the very charters of Levittown and suburbs across America were closely intertwined with the preservation of the capitalist American way in the face of growing Soviet international influence.
Though the government attempted to address the severe housing shortage by launching some public housing programs, those programs were viciously vilified by right-wing politicians as a form of socialism. The Levitts and McCarthy joined forces in promoting Levittown as a more American, capitalist alternative to public housing solutions.
McCarthy posed with washing machines to be placed in Levittown homes and praised Levittown as a model of the American way. The construction and growth of Levittown was a godsend for many houseless families, but it was also a battleground for divisive conceptions of race and political differences in the United States. Sadly, the experiences of the Myers in Levittown were not unique but were echoed in houses, apartments, and streets across the nation.
How was segregation still such a real, persevering and violent part of communities long after residential segregation laws had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in ? The HOLC later implemented a system of rating neighborhoods with letter grades to help more systematically discern property values.
Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized; FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. The rating system eventually contributed to reinforcing segregation as real estate agents and landlords steered white buyers to white communities and African Americans to poorer developments. The system also enforced the perception that the entry of racial minorities into a community resulted in a drop in property values.
Not all communities replicated the racial tensions of Levittown, however. In , President John F. Kennedy issued an Executive Order prohibiting racial discrimination in any housing developments built or bought with the assistance of the federal government. Though the move was an important step in preventing federal agencies from enabling the racial policies of communities like Levittown, the house-by-house, street-by-street battle for integration of suburban communities and city blocks would last much longer.
The uniform houses and immaculate lawns of the Levittown version of Suburbia made an indelible impression in the American mind, and an image of the winding roads of Levittown still conjures associations of a peaceful, wholesome Leave it To Beaver -type existence.
But the legacy of the suburbs that Levittown embodied was not simple, as shown by the struggle of the Myers. Others attacked suburban communities not just for their segregationism, but for a uniformity of spirit some saw as worth struggling against.
The song has been covered by countless other folk singers since, including Pete Seeger:. The suburbs have clearly come to symbolize more than just collections of white picket-fenced houses outside a city. The story of Levittown captures both the hopeful and darker sides of the rise of the American suburbs. My parents moved into Levittown, NY, after the war. And, sadly, the fear of that outcome may have contributed to their imposing a racial exclusion policy. They only lived there for about three years, but babies 3 and 4 were born there.
Even years later, I never heard either of my parents mention the policy of segregation in the community. I would imagine at the time they were just too concerned with putting a roof over their growing family. I still have photos taken on our front lawn of the first four of us kids in our family.
Levittown served a purpose in providing affordable housing for returning veterans. When my parents bought in , they bought directly from the Levitt company and they were told quite clearly of that of the white-only policy.
In later years and when they sold in after I had finished high school, no one mentioned it. The legacy of the policy lingers as even today Levittown has a very small percentage non-white, which is perhpas surprising considering that the houses are still among the most affordable in the county.
As the article notes and other histories confirm, housing discrimination was widespread and practiced by all the those involved in real estate government agencies, lenders, realtors, homeowners, etc. What the Levitts did was perhaps more notable because of size of their remarkable housing development and the clarity of their discriminatory policy. Especially not in areas that were predominantly white, and where more white people would be living. For advantaged buyers, loans had never been easier to attain, consumer goods had never been more accessible, and well-paying jobs had never been more abundant.
And yet, beneath the aggregate numbers, patterns of racial disparity, sexual discrimination, and economic inequality persevered and questioned man of the assumptions of an Affluent Society. In real estate appraisers arrived in sunny Pasadena, California.
While suburbanization and the new consumer economy produced unprecedented wealth and affluence, the fruits of this economic and spatial abundance did not reach all Americans equally. The new economic structures and suburban spaces of the postwar period produced perhaps as much inequality as affluence.
Wealth created by the booming economy filtered through social structures with built-in privileges and prejudices. Just when many middle and lower class white American families began their journey of upward mobility by moving to the suburbs with the help of government spending and government programs such as the FHA and the GI Bill, many African Americans and other racial minorities found themselves systematically shut out.
A look at the relationship between federal organizations such as the HOLC and FHA and private banks, lenders, and real estate agents tells the story of standardized policies that produced a segregated housing market. At the core of HOLC appraisal techniques, which private parties also adopted, was the pernicious insistence that mixed-race and minority dominated neighborhoods were credit risks.
In partnership with local lenders and real estate agents, HOLC created Residential Security Maps to identify high and low risk-lending areas. People familiar with the local real estate market filled out uniform surveys on each neighborhood. Relying on this information, HOLC assigned every neighborhood a letter grade from A to D and a corresponding color code. The least secure, highest risk neighborhoods for loans received a D grade and the color red.
Doing so made visible the areas they believed were unfit for their services, denying black residents loans, housing, groceries, and other necessities of modern life. Redlined Map of Greater Atlanta. Millions of Americans received mortgages that they otherwise would not have qualified for.
Levittown and its descendants three of which Levitt himself built in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico, all of which he also named Levittown lured a generation out of the cities. Their children grew up shaped by these secure and innovative if sometimes alienating environments — and went on themselves to raise the generation that has made a return, full-circle, to the city. Levittown, the prototypical American suburb — a history of cities in 50 buildings, day Pruitt-Igoe: the troubled high-rise that came to define urban America — a history of cities in 50 buildings, day Read more.
0コメント