1. William Jaird Levitt was an American real-estate developer and housing pioneer.
21 Facts About William Levitt
1. 2.
William Levitt was born in 1907 to a Jewish family in Brooklyn.
3.
William Levitt's generation was the second since emigrating from Russia and Austria; the paternal grandparents who immigrated to the United States had been a rabbi grandfather from Russia and a grandmother from Austria-Germany.
4.
William Levitt's father was Abraham Levitt, a Brooklyn-born real estate attorney and part-time investor; his mother was Pauline Biederman.
5.
William Levitt received a public school education at Public School 44 and Boys High School.
6.
William Levitt then attended New York University for three years, but dropped out before graduating.
7.
William Levitt served as company president, overseeing all aspects of the company except for the designs of the homes they built, which fell to William's brother Alfred.
8.
William Levitt had houses built in less than six weeks on inexpensive land with no urban infrastructure.
9.
The assembly line construction method enabled William Levitt to build more efficiently than other developers at the time, with teams of specialized workers following each other from house to house to complete incremental steps in the construction.
10.
William Levitt reduced the cost of constructing houses by freezing out union labor.
11.
William Levitt cut out middlemen and purchased many items, including lumber and televisions, directly from manufacturers, as well as constructing his own factory to produce nails.
12.
In 1952, people started buying over 17,000 William Levitt-built homes in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
13.
William Levitt lived in a lavish 30-room mansion on his "La Coline" estate in Mill Neck, New York, and spent much of his time on La Belle Simone, his 237 feet yacht named after his third wife.
14.
William Levitt fought legal challenges in New Jersey courts until the United States Supreme Court refused to hear his case.
15.
William Levitt has been criticized for his racially discriminatory policies when providing housing, which were especially discriminatory to African Americans, Jews, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans and Native Americans.
16.
William Levitt entered the agreement thinking he would play an active role in ITT affairs, but executives felt Levitt was too old to take on more responsibility.
17.
William Levitt established a series of companies and joint ventures through the 1970s and 1980s which failed.
18.
William Levitt was accused of misappropriation of funds from the charitable Levitt Foundation and agreed to repay $5 million, more than $5 million or $11 million.
19.
William Levitt died from kidney disease at a hospital in Manhasset, New York, on January 28,1994, at the age of 86.
20.
William Levitt came to symbolize the new suburban growth with his use of mass-production techniques to construct large developments of houses, eponymously named Levittowns, selling for under $10,000.
21.
Ten years later, in 1969, William Levitt divorced his second wife and married a French art dealer, Simone Korchin.