1 gen 1947 anni - First Levittown built outside NYC

Descrizione:

Levittown: A Long Island, New York, suburb, built by William J. Levitt in the late 1940s, that used mass-production techniques to build modest, affordable houses. Other Levittowns were built in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

shelley v. kraemer: 1948 Supreme Court decision that outlawed racially restrictive housing occupancy covenants. However, racial discrimination persisted until the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968.

By any definition, Americans prospered after World War II. Prosperity — how much an economy produces, how much people earn — is more easily measured than is quality of life. During the 1950s, however, a distinct American template for “the good life” emerged: a high value on consumption, a devotion to family and domesticity, and a preference for suburban living. The third element of that template, suburbanization, was actually a vast internal migration: millions of Americans moved from large central cities — places such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago, and Atlanta, among a host others — to countless smaller communities on the urban periphery. That migration transformed the geography of the country and set in motion social and political changes whose effects would last for decades (see “Thinking Like a Historian”).

The suburbs were not a new invention. For more than a century, Americans had been moving out of densely populated cities. But what started as a trickle before World War II became a flood thereafter. In 1910, one American in fourteen lived in a suburb. By 1960, one in three did. In the years following the war, farmland on the outskirts of countless cities filled up with tract housing and shopping centers. Entire counties — such as San Mateo, south of San Francisco, or Passaic and Bergen in New Jersey, west of Manhattan — went from rural to suburban. Home construction, which had ground to a halt during the Great Depression, surged after the war. A quarter of the country’s housing stock in 1960 had not even existed a decade earlier.

Two particular postwar developments remade the national housing market into a distinctly suburban shape. First, an innovative Long Island building contractor, William J. Levitt, applied mass-production techniques to construction, allowing his company to build modest, affordable houses rapidly and inexpensively. Soon his company was turning out entire neighborhoods of houses at a dizzying speed. Levitt’s basic four-room house, complete with kitchen appliances, was priced at $7,990 when homes in the first Levittown went on sale in 1947 (about $95,000 today). Levitt did not need to advertise; word of mouth brought buyers flocking to his developments (all called Levittown) in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Seeing Levitt’s success, developers across the country snapped up cheap farmland to build their own subdivisions.


Two particular postwar developments remade the national housing market into a distinctly suburban shape. First, an innovative Long Island building contractor, William J. Levitt, applied mass-production techniques to construction, allowing his company to build modest, affordable houses rapidly and inexpensively. Soon his company was turning out entire neighborhoods of houses at a dizzying speed. Levitt’s basic four-room house, complete with kitchen appliances, was priced at $7,990 when homes in the first Levittown went on sale in 1947 (about $95,000 today). Levitt did not need to advertise; word of mouth brought buyers flocking to his developments (all called Levittown) in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Seeing Levitt’s success, developers across the country snapped up cheap farmland to build their own subdivisions.

The second innovation came in home finance. Even at $7,990, Levitt’s homes were beyond the means of most young families working by the traditional home-financing standard — a down payment of half the full price and ten years to pay off the balance. But the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Veterans Administration (VA) — that is, the federal government — radically reshaped the home mortgage market, making home ownership more accessible than ever before. After the war, the FHA insured thirty-year mortgages with as little as 5 percent down and interest at 2 or 3 percent. The VA was even more generous, requiring only a token $1 down payment for qualified ex-GIs. Home ownership rates had hovered around 45 percent for half a century, but FHA and VA mortgages helped push the number to 60 percent by 1960.

Much about the suburbs was new, but they also reflected well-established discriminatory patterns. Levitt’s houses came with restrictive covenants prohibiting occupancy “by members of other than the Caucasian Race.” Levittowns were not an outlier. All across the country, formal and informal agreements barred African Americans from owning or renting homes in most suburban areas — in some places, Jews, Latinos, and Asian Americans also faced exclusion. Suburban developments from coast to coast exhibited the same age, class, and racial homogeneity. In Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the Supreme Court outlawed restrictive covenants, but racial discrimination in housing persisted. The FHA and VA continued a practice known as redlining: refusing to insure mortgages in mixed race neighborhoods, on the grounds that such areas were “blighted” — marked on maps by a red line. It would be twenty years after Shelley that federal law explicitly prohibited racial discrimination, when Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968.

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