In my area, (Gainesville Ga. ) housing construction seems, at best, a haphazard process. I witness houses sitting for weeks at a time waiting on individual trades to show up. How anyone makes money considering the carrying costs of land, materials , etc. is hard to understand.
I grew up in the 60’s in Calgary, Alberta. The topography was basically gently rolling prairie, topsoil yards deep, nary a rock to be found. Developers would buy a chunk of land, lay out a road grid, drop in utilities, and start banging out cookie cutter houses, which would sell quickly. You could dig a hole one day, pour the foundation the next, and have the house framed out in a couple of weeks. Not quite mass production, but pretty close. The process was repeated year after year. Likely a function of rapid population growth, easy money, easy building conditions, and fairly lax planning controls. To some extent, Calgary still grows the same way, although the conditions have changed somewhat over time (slowing growth, tighter money, starting to run into the foothills with more varied topography, tighter building codes).
I moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia in the 80’s. Rocky terrain, very hard to level it up, lay out roads, bury utilities. Much less cookie cutter construction, much slower growth. Even now, it can take weeks with heavy machinery to make a hole for the basement. Interestingly, due to the geology of the province, the easier places to build are about an hour from the urban core, so we saw a lot of satellite communities springing up.
Now there’s a “housing crisis”, as there is everywhere. Big push in the urban core to speed up construction, increase density, relax building and development regulations, improve affordability, etc. I’m not sure that this will have any meaningful impact on the availability of housing. The rocky geology is the same, we are on a peninsula (so land is a limited resource), and the developers are slow to build even when they have a development permit in hand. There’s no big plots of land available to build on.
Thanks for the informative comment! In Halifax, one suggestion is to allow apartment buildings to be somewhat taller. Once you've gone through the work of preparing the site, adding one more floor doesn't require any more land, so you get economies of scale. https://morehousing.ca/sydney
Well, they’ve not just said “a little bit taller”, they’ve said 40 stories tall in the midst of neighborhoods where the other structures are 2-3 stories tall. At some point, the scale of the new building overwhelms the local infrastructure, in terms of roads, parking, water, sewer, electrical grid, schools, parks, and other amenities.
Dear Construction Physics author: At the opposite end of the spectrum, I wonder what you would think of the possibility of a future in which Americans would take an active part in the construction of their own houses, gradually, building one room at a time, financing as they go. And not just for the money it would save in a period of extended austerity (which I see coming) but for the pleasure of making things, what Veblen called "the instinct of workmanship"?
There are a number of tool and construction innovations that could make this a more feasible thing to do -- to say nothing of the opportunities made possible by lives based on part-time employment -- than was the case in the past.
Your thoughts would be very much appreciated also with regard to the first half of that same chapter where I discuss the construction and financing of new towns in the countryside, conceived as the third and probably final stage in the suburbanization of the metropolitan complex.
My immediate concern with that is where would these people live while they're building their house - a trailer in the yard perhaps? The advantage of building a house reasonably rapidly is that once it's done you can live in it, whereas having an unfinished envelope sounds deeply uncomfortable, leaning towards dangerous in harsher weather, not to mention the damage you'd likely get to interior finishes and fittings if you installed them before the roof and walls are done.
True, building one's own house implies a period of austerity. Before they could resettle, couples would have to work full-time in the city to save enough money to buy a building lot and enough materials to get some kind of a roof over their heads, after which would come an extended period of cramped quarters as they add one room at a time. Might take seven years in all.
Clearly this is an idea for the young at heart, even though a period of considerable austerity likely lies in their futures no matter what, since as a society we cannot go on indefinitely consuming more than we produce decade after decade.
Best to make a virtue out of necessity while appealing to the idealistic side of young human nature.
I also think cars were a huge part of this housing technological change. Cars were a lot better after the war. They weren't building any cars for years during the war and sales were low during the Depression so the stock of cars was dated. The "modern" 1940s car enabled living out in the middle of nowhere on Long Island. Additionally, land was cheap when its use was agriculture but as suburban development became a thing, value of nearby farmland slowly incorporated its now higher development value which in turn increased new home prices. That part of Levitt's first-mover advantage was lost.
I think you are absolutely right to draw the attention of readers to the role of mortgage finance, here in the UK, the ratio of average earning to average house prices has gone from 3.5 x to 8.5 x -while loan to value and earnings multiples have remained relatively constant. How? By extending the tenor of mortgages from the 20/25 year type to to to 45 years. To me this is little better than bonded labour, a lifetime of debt to enrich the landowners who are fortunate enough to get planning permission on their land. Scarcity of supply is a necessary condition for house price inflation, but is not a sufficient condition for it, you need the supply of mortgage finance to be there to accomodate price inflation.
This is one of the reasons that housing is cheaper in the South. Pre-war and post-war Southern policy suppressed economic growth, so, even now, there are a lot areas at the edge of the city where tracts of houses can be built.
I had the song “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds in my head when I read this, especially the “houses made of ticky tacky” lyric. She wrote the song after driving past a copycat development in South San Francisco for her commute. Thankfully, today with companies such as Unity Homes, there’s a greater interest in some kind of customization
"And the people all come out the same"? A lot of Filipinos (among the diverse assortment of residents) in Daly City might not look too kindly on Malvina Reynolds.
I think her song was more of a barbed criticism of the class system and typical lifestyles of the suburbs, not of a racial group. I’m a FilAm too, though I haven’t met anyone from Daly City or asked them about the song
No, of course, she wasn't ridiculing any racial group. I was merely pointing out the ethnic (and other) diversity of the people who actually live in Daly City -- many of whom, in particular, are currently of Filipino backgrounds. Given that reality (and the diversity of the suburban population in general), her barbs are wildly off-base.
(FWIW, I'm a gay NY Jew, and I lived in Daly City for seven years [and yes, I consider those "barbs" inappropriate and insulting].)
Me, too. I also remember that Beverly Cleary in one of her Henry Higgins stories had a Levittown like development finished but for the house numbers, so after some big event no one could figure out how to get back home.
It is an interesting piece, but discussing housing mass production without even mentioning Soviet panel apartment buildings (where "panel" is basically a preproduced square of wall) strikes me as weird.
There are mentions of soviet prefab apartment buildings in other articles though I would love a more in-depth analysis. Most of this substack is about mass production of housing so there's no need to bring that topic up in every particular piece.
Of course. They are called Pommes Frites (or Pommes for short) as far as I am concerned.
But that's because I grew up in East Germany, with many commie blocks.
You seem to refering to some incident in ancient American history? That one doesn't seem particularly relevant to the discussion at hand, so we better avoid it, American partisan politics is a virus that tends to invade discussions unless explicitly and vigilantly fought against.
I don't refer to any incident, I just say that calling something "X Y" when X is a adjective for a country that practices it basically never means that it is _restricted_ to that country
Post World War II there was an intense demand for housing. One New Yorker cartoon had a line of families with children in carriages and strollers waiting at a building site where the foundation was being dug. 'An Apartment for Judy' was about a young woman, something of a wheeler dealer, desperately trying to keep a professor from committing suicide so she and her husband could keep renting his attic. (It's actually pretty funny despite morbid elements.)
You can see why it is hard to build houses the way we build cars. Cars are built in a factory and delivered. Houses are too big for the most part. Even prefabs need land prep, utilities and road work. Levitt had to build factories - cabinets, panels, cement - to operate his construction pipeline. He had to carry inventory to keep the pipeline running. Every site has that overhead, factories, inventory and full time workers.
I know it's a much smaller scale, but we got a 'Tuff Shed,' a 120 square foot shed that we subsequently finished. I got to watch as the team came out, laid a flagstone foundation, put up all four (finished and painted) walls and the roof within four hours. It was quite a sight to see.
A very interesting historical account of improving housing production methods. Also interesting to note the many - even more so today - influences on this industry. (demand, land availability/costs, planning/zoning/permitting process, NIMBYism which still exists today, financing costs, REITs, short-term rentals, building codes, environmental issues, etc.) The actual building (production) methods did influence some changes or modernization of materials, methods, tools. Today's affordable housing crisis has the house building industry around the globe collaborating on methods for improvement. Can we learn from the millwork industry where standardized measure (32mm system) and technology revolutionized production. CNC machines - hardware standardized for the 32mm system, standardized panel sizing. A panelized or/and modular unit approach would demand standards but like LEGO could result in numerous combinations of standardized units to build most anything. This approach could also work for commercial and institutional buildings like schools that need to expand/contract with enrolment and hospitals that also need to expand/reconfigure for changing technology and demand flows. Washroom for example are rather standardized in required function but vary in size. These could be prefabricated of various installations - the room instead of sing fixtures. The possibilities are endless ...
That might be an important aspect in some absolute sense, but it's almost irrelevant for the question of what we can learn from the company's successes and failures and apply to modern construction.
The company's successes and failures were shaped around certain "market conditions" (see the articles conclusions citing that), and not wholly their construction methods. The initial success came from them being able to build quickly, having people specialized in a specific trade, which is still the standard practice today. So you could say they did revolutionize the building method. But a lot of the success also came from selling to only white people, like literal covenants in the mortgages said white people only. So the "market conditions" during the success were pretty much tied to making these white only communities super fast, and then the downfall coincides with density legislation that was a reaction to outlawing redlining in 1968. People could still have their segregated communities without redlining by using zoning laws to create lower density suburbs. The downfall doesn't seem to be tied to any lessons that we can apply to modern construction practices. The construction methods didn't fail (we still pretty much use similar methods today), the market changed. I think Levittown is more or less a history in residential development, zoning, and racism in the US.
What would be your biggest take away from this article that we can apply to modern construction practices?
The "white flight" aspect of this story was long ago worked into the ground.
These days, those mass-produced suburbs are home to a kaleidoscopic multitude of ethnicities (i.e., in the Bay Area, Fremont, El Cerrito, Milpitas, etc.) -- and the best mom-and-pop eateries are in their much-despised (by urbanists) strip malls.
You want to see "whiteness"? Try the walkable waddle.
The article chronicles the downfall in the early 70s and cites market reasons and legislation that impacted density requirements as the reasons the company ultimately failed, and not their construction methods. So I think it would make sense to expand on those market conditions. Redlining was outlawed in 1968, which coincidentally lines up pretty closely with the downfall of the company. The reaction to outlawing redlining was the zoning and legislation mentioned in the article, and this is what impacted their development method of higher density neighborhoods the most.
And the article doesn’t really wrap up the point of why Levittown didn’t revolutionize homebuilding. By all accounts the construction methods used did, and I’m pretty sure the practice of trades and expertise in a specific trade were expanded after the war to build homes quickly. Taking notes from Ford and automobile production. Which is still the standard practice today.
The conclusion says something like “levitt’s dream was based on certain market conditions”, and that is expanded on by noting the zoning and legislation around high density neighborhoods as one of the main reasons for levittown’s downfall in this article. But the zoning and density legislation were both direct reactions to making redlining illegal but still giving people segregated neighborhoods.
I think that Levitt is a useful case study, but nowadays car factories can produce dozens of variations on the same model on the same line, its all a question of logistics the old Laing Home firm in the UK pioneered "superhomes" a set of standard designs that cam in 10' containers containing the components needed for each house. The logistics were good enough for the designers to vary; roof pitches, roofing material, cladding material, window type, and front door type. There was no need for the finished product to look like "cookie cutter" housing.
Today, most home builders lack the interest in design or construction and have far too much capital tied up in expensive land to worry about such things or be able to invest in them. This results in a vicious circle of poor quality design , worse low cost construction and consequent opposition to releasing more land for "ticky-tacky boxes" to be "slung up" on. Home builders need to invest in CAD, in the IT of logistics. Sadly the people at the top of these companies seem to all have either land buying or finance backgrounds and are therefore intellectually ill-equipped to face the challenges of the industry.
Great piece! Housing stock is so low but the country has changed so much since the postwar days.
It feels as though we're much more like Europe at this point, where land ownership is less and less common on an individual basis and development is much more restricted. Another generation and it's hard to say where we'll be.
Quite an interesting article, thank you. Just one quick fact check/correction — the “fourth” Levittown in Prince George’s County, Maryland (between Annapolis and DC, as noted in the NYT article) was indeed built and completed in the early/mid 1960s. It’s just not called Levittown — it was incorporated into Bowie, Maryland, where it formed a core part of the city. I grew up there in the 1970s and 1980s. There were three basic models — single floor ranchers, two floor Cape Cods, and two floor colonials, repeated/alternated down blocks with floor plans more or less flipped between iteration. It was the subject of concerted efforts by the NAACP to open sales to African Americans (the Levitts eventually relented). Each neighborhood had streets beginning with the same letter: when meeting a fellow Bowieite for the first time, you’ll frequently ask what section you were from (B section for Buckingham, F section for Foxhill, S section for Somerset, etc) and most sections had their own elementary schools. A good place to grow up.
From my admittedly cursory research the two seem quite compatible, operating on different levels or scales, as it were. I have no objection to intentional communities being set up, but any such system inevitably has the problem of what to do with the people who (for whatever reason) don't fit in to any of the available groups, and former members of groups that suffer irreconcilable internal conflict or otherwise fail, for all of which UBI seems like a solid safety net.
And then there's the question of how to arbitrate conflicts of interest between such communities, much of which is rooted in land use or similar property-rights issues. LVT could be thought of as an arbitration mechanism based on giving the benefit of the doubt to whichever phalansterie (or household, corporate campus, whatever) has contributed the most to the UBI fund, relative to the space they're taking up, which would tend to promote efficiency and mutual benefit over the long term, while making as few assumptions as possible about what ultimate success might look like.
In my area, (Gainesville Ga. ) housing construction seems, at best, a haphazard process. I witness houses sitting for weeks at a time waiting on individual trades to show up. How anyone makes money considering the carrying costs of land, materials , etc. is hard to understand.
Interesting!
I grew up in the 60’s in Calgary, Alberta. The topography was basically gently rolling prairie, topsoil yards deep, nary a rock to be found. Developers would buy a chunk of land, lay out a road grid, drop in utilities, and start banging out cookie cutter houses, which would sell quickly. You could dig a hole one day, pour the foundation the next, and have the house framed out in a couple of weeks. Not quite mass production, but pretty close. The process was repeated year after year. Likely a function of rapid population growth, easy money, easy building conditions, and fairly lax planning controls. To some extent, Calgary still grows the same way, although the conditions have changed somewhat over time (slowing growth, tighter money, starting to run into the foothills with more varied topography, tighter building codes).
I moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia in the 80’s. Rocky terrain, very hard to level it up, lay out roads, bury utilities. Much less cookie cutter construction, much slower growth. Even now, it can take weeks with heavy machinery to make a hole for the basement. Interestingly, due to the geology of the province, the easier places to build are about an hour from the urban core, so we saw a lot of satellite communities springing up.
Now there’s a “housing crisis”, as there is everywhere. Big push in the urban core to speed up construction, increase density, relax building and development regulations, improve affordability, etc. I’m not sure that this will have any meaningful impact on the availability of housing. The rocky geology is the same, we are on a peninsula (so land is a limited resource), and the developers are slow to build even when they have a development permit in hand. There’s no big plots of land available to build on.
Thanks for the informative comment! In Halifax, one suggestion is to allow apartment buildings to be somewhat taller. Once you've gone through the work of preparing the site, adding one more floor doesn't require any more land, so you get economies of scale. https://morehousing.ca/sydney
Well, they’ve not just said “a little bit taller”, they’ve said 40 stories tall in the midst of neighborhoods where the other structures are 2-3 stories tall. At some point, the scale of the new building overwhelms the local infrastructure, in terms of roads, parking, water, sewer, electrical grid, schools, parks, and other amenities.
Dear Construction Physics author: At the opposite end of the spectrum, I wonder what you would think of the possibility of a future in which Americans would take an active part in the construction of their own houses, gradually, building one room at a time, financing as they go. And not just for the money it would save in a period of extended austerity (which I see coming) but for the pleasure of making things, what Veblen called "the instinct of workmanship"?
There are a number of tool and construction innovations that could make this a more feasible thing to do -- to say nothing of the opportunities made possible by lives based on part-time employment -- than was the case in the past.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW See end of chapter three, "A Business Plan"
Your thoughts would be very much appreciated also with regard to the first half of that same chapter where I discuss the construction and financing of new towns in the countryside, conceived as the third and probably final stage in the suburbanization of the metropolitan complex.
I enjoy your substack very much. Lots of fun.
Luke Lea
My immediate concern with that is where would these people live while they're building their house - a trailer in the yard perhaps? The advantage of building a house reasonably rapidly is that once it's done you can live in it, whereas having an unfinished envelope sounds deeply uncomfortable, leaning towards dangerous in harsher weather, not to mention the damage you'd likely get to interior finishes and fittings if you installed them before the roof and walls are done.
True, building one's own house implies a period of austerity. Before they could resettle, couples would have to work full-time in the city to save enough money to buy a building lot and enough materials to get some kind of a roof over their heads, after which would come an extended period of cramped quarters as they add one room at a time. Might take seven years in all.
Clearly this is an idea for the young at heart, even though a period of considerable austerity likely lies in their futures no matter what, since as a society we cannot go on indefinitely consuming more than we produce decade after decade.
Best to make a virtue out of necessity while appealing to the idealistic side of young human nature.
GREAT piece!
A quibble about mortgages in the 1930s.
"Mortgages in 1930
#1 – Savings and Loans (including building and loan associations, and mutual savings banks)
• 45% of all outstanding mortgages in 1930
• 40% average down payment (average, so often lower)
• 11 years average length (max 15 years)
• 95% partially or fully amortized (no balloon payment at end)
S&L interest rates were a bit higher and you had to have a long track record of saving with them before they would lend you money to buy a house."
https://realestatedecoded.com/2-surprising-facts-about-the-black-homeownership-rate-from-1950-to-today/
I also think cars were a huge part of this housing technological change. Cars were a lot better after the war. They weren't building any cars for years during the war and sales were low during the Depression so the stock of cars was dated. The "modern" 1940s car enabled living out in the middle of nowhere on Long Island. Additionally, land was cheap when its use was agriculture but as suburban development became a thing, value of nearby farmland slowly incorporated its now higher development value which in turn increased new home prices. That part of Levitt's first-mover advantage was lost.
Another reference I like on this rise of the modern residential subdivision, https://www.globalurban.org/Rise_of_Community_Builders.pdf
I think you are absolutely right to draw the attention of readers to the role of mortgage finance, here in the UK, the ratio of average earning to average house prices has gone from 3.5 x to 8.5 x -while loan to value and earnings multiples have remained relatively constant. How? By extending the tenor of mortgages from the 20/25 year type to to to 45 years. To me this is little better than bonded labour, a lifetime of debt to enrich the landowners who are fortunate enough to get planning permission on their land. Scarcity of supply is a necessary condition for house price inflation, but is not a sufficient condition for it, you need the supply of mortgage finance to be there to accomodate price inflation.
This is one of the reasons that housing is cheaper in the South. Pre-war and post-war Southern policy suppressed economic growth, so, even now, there are a lot areas at the edge of the city where tracts of houses can be built.
I had the song “Little Boxes” by Malvina Reynolds in my head when I read this, especially the “houses made of ticky tacky” lyric. She wrote the song after driving past a copycat development in South San Francisco for her commute. Thankfully, today with companies such as Unity Homes, there’s a greater interest in some kind of customization
* Daly City, actually, I stand corrected
"And the people all come out the same"? A lot of Filipinos (among the diverse assortment of residents) in Daly City might not look too kindly on Malvina Reynolds.
I think her song was more of a barbed criticism of the class system and typical lifestyles of the suburbs, not of a racial group. I’m a FilAm too, though I haven’t met anyone from Daly City or asked them about the song
No, of course, she wasn't ridiculing any racial group. I was merely pointing out the ethnic (and other) diversity of the people who actually live in Daly City -- many of whom, in particular, are currently of Filipino backgrounds. Given that reality (and the diversity of the suburban population in general), her barbs are wildly off-base.
(FWIW, I'm a gay NY Jew, and I lived in Daly City for seven years [and yes, I consider those "barbs" inappropriate and insulting].)
Me, too. I also remember that Beverly Cleary in one of her Henry Higgins stories had a Levittown like development finished but for the house numbers, so after some big event no one could figure out how to get back home.
It is an interesting piece, but discussing housing mass production without even mentioning Soviet panel apartment buildings (where "panel" is basically a preproduced square of wall) strikes me as weird.
There are mentions of soviet prefab apartment buildings in other articles though I would love a more in-depth analysis. Most of this substack is about mass production of housing so there's no need to bring that topic up in every particular piece.
They weren't restricted to the Soviet Union nor the Eastern block.
Prefab was also used in the West, even if not quite as extensively.
Singapore's Housing Development Board's buildings are a good and contemporary example of what's possible here.
Btw, I'm fairly sure the blog covered 'commie-block' style prefabs already in other posts. They don't need to cover prefabs in every post.
Didn't claim they were. Do you also refuse to call French fries French?
Of course. They are called Pommes Frites (or Pommes for short) as far as I am concerned.
But that's because I grew up in East Germany, with many commie blocks.
You seem to refering to some incident in ancient American history? That one doesn't seem particularly relevant to the discussion at hand, so we better avoid it, American partisan politics is a virus that tends to invade discussions unless explicitly and vigilantly fought against.
I don't refer to any incident, I just say that calling something "X Y" when X is a adjective for a country that practices it basically never means that it is _restricted_ to that country
Post World War II there was an intense demand for housing. One New Yorker cartoon had a line of families with children in carriages and strollers waiting at a building site where the foundation was being dug. 'An Apartment for Judy' was about a young woman, something of a wheeler dealer, desperately trying to keep a professor from committing suicide so she and her husband could keep renting his attic. (It's actually pretty funny despite morbid elements.)
You can see why it is hard to build houses the way we build cars. Cars are built in a factory and delivered. Houses are too big for the most part. Even prefabs need land prep, utilities and road work. Levitt had to build factories - cabinets, panels, cement - to operate his construction pipeline. He had to carry inventory to keep the pipeline running. Every site has that overhead, factories, inventory and full time workers.
> Post World War II there was an intense demand for housing.
There's still intense demand for housing, ask any Millennial or Zoomer.
I know it's a much smaller scale, but we got a 'Tuff Shed,' a 120 square foot shed that we subsequently finished. I got to watch as the team came out, laid a flagstone foundation, put up all four (finished and painted) walls and the roof within four hours. It was quite a sight to see.
A very interesting historical account of improving housing production methods. Also interesting to note the many - even more so today - influences on this industry. (demand, land availability/costs, planning/zoning/permitting process, NIMBYism which still exists today, financing costs, REITs, short-term rentals, building codes, environmental issues, etc.) The actual building (production) methods did influence some changes or modernization of materials, methods, tools. Today's affordable housing crisis has the house building industry around the globe collaborating on methods for improvement. Can we learn from the millwork industry where standardized measure (32mm system) and technology revolutionized production. CNC machines - hardware standardized for the 32mm system, standardized panel sizing. A panelized or/and modular unit approach would demand standards but like LEGO could result in numerous combinations of standardized units to build most anything. This approach could also work for commercial and institutional buildings like schools that need to expand/contract with enrolment and hospitals that also need to expand/reconfigure for changing technology and demand flows. Washroom for example are rather standardized in required function but vary in size. These could be prefabricated of various installations - the room instead of sing fixtures. The possibilities are endless ...
Not enough focus on the white-only part of Levittown. Kind of weird imo.
That might be an important aspect in some absolute sense, but it's almost irrelevant for the question of what we can learn from the company's successes and failures and apply to modern construction.
The company's successes and failures were shaped around certain "market conditions" (see the articles conclusions citing that), and not wholly their construction methods. The initial success came from them being able to build quickly, having people specialized in a specific trade, which is still the standard practice today. So you could say they did revolutionize the building method. But a lot of the success also came from selling to only white people, like literal covenants in the mortgages said white people only. So the "market conditions" during the success were pretty much tied to making these white only communities super fast, and then the downfall coincides with density legislation that was a reaction to outlawing redlining in 1968. People could still have their segregated communities without redlining by using zoning laws to create lower density suburbs. The downfall doesn't seem to be tied to any lessons that we can apply to modern construction practices. The construction methods didn't fail (we still pretty much use similar methods today), the market changed. I think Levittown is more or less a history in residential development, zoning, and racism in the US.
What would be your biggest take away from this article that we can apply to modern construction practices?
Now that's a reasonable argument that someone can make about why exploring the 'white-only' part imight be relevant.
The "white flight" aspect of this story was long ago worked into the ground.
These days, those mass-produced suburbs are home to a kaleidoscopic multitude of ethnicities (i.e., in the Bay Area, Fremont, El Cerrito, Milpitas, etc.) -- and the best mom-and-pop eateries are in their much-despised (by urbanists) strip malls.
You want to see "whiteness"? Try the walkable waddle.
Not enough in what sense?
The article chronicles the downfall in the early 70s and cites market reasons and legislation that impacted density requirements as the reasons the company ultimately failed, and not their construction methods. So I think it would make sense to expand on those market conditions. Redlining was outlawed in 1968, which coincidentally lines up pretty closely with the downfall of the company. The reaction to outlawing redlining was the zoning and legislation mentioned in the article, and this is what impacted their development method of higher density neighborhoods the most.
And the article doesn’t really wrap up the point of why Levittown didn’t revolutionize homebuilding. By all accounts the construction methods used did, and I’m pretty sure the practice of trades and expertise in a specific trade were expanded after the war to build homes quickly. Taking notes from Ford and automobile production. Which is still the standard practice today.
The conclusion says something like “levitt’s dream was based on certain market conditions”, and that is expanded on by noting the zoning and legislation around high density neighborhoods as one of the main reasons for levittown’s downfall in this article. But the zoning and density legislation were both direct reactions to making redlining illegal but still giving people segregated neighborhoods.
I think that Levitt is a useful case study, but nowadays car factories can produce dozens of variations on the same model on the same line, its all a question of logistics the old Laing Home firm in the UK pioneered "superhomes" a set of standard designs that cam in 10' containers containing the components needed for each house. The logistics were good enough for the designers to vary; roof pitches, roofing material, cladding material, window type, and front door type. There was no need for the finished product to look like "cookie cutter" housing.
Today, most home builders lack the interest in design or construction and have far too much capital tied up in expensive land to worry about such things or be able to invest in them. This results in a vicious circle of poor quality design , worse low cost construction and consequent opposition to releasing more land for "ticky-tacky boxes" to be "slung up" on. Home builders need to invest in CAD, in the IT of logistics. Sadly the people at the top of these companies seem to all have either land buying or finance backgrounds and are therefore intellectually ill-equipped to face the challenges of the industry.
Great piece! Housing stock is so low but the country has changed so much since the postwar days.
It feels as though we're much more like Europe at this point, where land ownership is less and less common on an individual basis and development is much more restricted. Another generation and it's hard to say where we'll be.
Redistributing that land value via Georgist UBI, hopefully.
I prefer Fourier phalansteries but yes that works.
Quite an interesting article, thank you. Just one quick fact check/correction — the “fourth” Levittown in Prince George’s County, Maryland (between Annapolis and DC, as noted in the NYT article) was indeed built and completed in the early/mid 1960s. It’s just not called Levittown — it was incorporated into Bowie, Maryland, where it formed a core part of the city. I grew up there in the 1970s and 1980s. There were three basic models — single floor ranchers, two floor Cape Cods, and two floor colonials, repeated/alternated down blocks with floor plans more or less flipped between iteration. It was the subject of concerted efforts by the NAACP to open sales to African Americans (the Levitts eventually relented). Each neighborhood had streets beginning with the same letter: when meeting a fellow Bowieite for the first time, you’ll frequently ask what section you were from (B section for Buckingham, F section for Foxhill, S section for Somerset, etc) and most sections had their own elementary schools. A good place to grow up.
From my admittedly cursory research the two seem quite compatible, operating on different levels or scales, as it were. I have no objection to intentional communities being set up, but any such system inevitably has the problem of what to do with the people who (for whatever reason) don't fit in to any of the available groups, and former members of groups that suffer irreconcilable internal conflict or otherwise fail, for all of which UBI seems like a solid safety net.
And then there's the question of how to arbitrate conflicts of interest between such communities, much of which is rooted in land use or similar property-rights issues. LVT could be thought of as an arbitration mechanism based on giving the benefit of the doubt to whichever phalansterie (or household, corporate campus, whatever) has contributed the most to the UBI fund, relative to the space they're taking up, which would tend to promote efficiency and mutual benefit over the long term, while making as few assumptions as possible about what ultimate success might look like.
I've been doing a little research on Fourier-ist communities in the USA and they fail for all the reasons you mention and more!
1) I can't see the axis titles on your graphs
2) $10k for 1000sqft is amazing value, $130k today for a decent house.
Outstanding and interesting post!
https://parametricmonkey.com/2023/10/12/rewriting-modular-constructions-shitty-first-draft/
Thanks for this excellent story.
Just to add up to the discussion, it is a good read why does the prefabrication still fails.
70 years fast forward and some of the same issues remain...
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Factory-Direct-Sale-Expandable-Container-House_1601153137220.html?spm=a2700.shop_plgr.41413.2.7f327121e4EYfz