Tag Archives: Levittowns

Donald Trump on Bill Leavitt in front of the Boy Scouts

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What did President and real estate developer Donald Trump think about real estate developer Bill Levitt? Here is what he said about halfway through a 2017 speech at the Boy Scout Jamboree (and discussed in Edward Berenson’s Perfect Communities):

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In life, in order to be successful — and you people are well on the road to success — you have to find out what makes you excited, what makes you want to get up each morning and go to work? You have to find it. If you love what you do and dedicate yourself to your work, then you will gain momentum? And look, you have to. You need the word “momentum.” You will gain that momentum. And each success will create another success. The word “momentum.”
I’ll tell you a story that’s very interesting for me. When I was young there was a man named William Levitt. You have some here. You have some in different states. Anybody ever hear of Levittown?
(APPLAUSE)
And he was a very successful man, became unbelievable — he was a home builder, became an unbelievable success, and got more and more successful. And he’d build homes, and at night he’d go to these major sites with teams of people, and he’d scour the sites for nails, and sawdust and small pieces of wood, and they cleaned the site, so when the workers came in the next morning, the sites would be spotless and clean, and he did it properly. And he did this for 20 years, and then he was offered a lot of money for his company, and he sold his company, for a tremendous amount of money, at the time especially. This is a long time ago. Sold his company for a tremendous amount of money.
And he went out and bought a big yacht, and he had a very interesting life. I won’t go any more than that, because you’re Boy Scouts so I’m not going to tell you what he did.
(CROWD CHANTING)
Should I tell you? Should I tell you?
(APPLAUSE)
You’re Boy Scouts, but you know life. You know life.
So look at you. Who would think this is the Boy Scouts, right? So he had a very, very interesting life, and the company that bought his company was a big conglomerate, and they didn’t know anything about building homes, and they didn’t know anything about picking up the nails and the sawdust and selling it, and the scraps of wood. This was a big conglomerate based in New York City.
And after about a 10-year period, there were losing a lot with it. It didn’t mean anything to them. And they couldn’t sell it. So they called William Levitt up, and they said, would you like to buy back your company, and he said, yes, I would. He so badly wanted it. He got bored with this life of yachts, and sailing, and all of the things he did in the south of France and other places. You won’t get bored, right? You know, truthfully, you’re workers. You’ll get bored too, believe me. Of course having a few good years like that isn’t so bad.
But what happened is he bought back his company, and he bought back a lot of empty land, and he worked hard at getting zoning, and he worked hard on starting to develop, and in the end he failed, and he failed badly, lost all of his money. He went personally bankrupt, and he was now much older. And I saw him at a cocktail party. And it was very sad because the hottest people in New York were at this party. It was the party of Steve Ross — Steve Ross, who was one of the great people. He came up and discovered, really founded Time Warner, and he was a great guy. He had a lot of successful people at the party.
And I was doing well, so I got invited to the party. I was very young. And I go in, but I’m in the real estate business, and I see a hundred people, some of whom I recognize, and they’re big in the entertainment business.
And I see sitting in the corner was a little old man who was all by himself. Nobody was talking to him. I immediately recognized that that man was the once great William Levitt, of Levittown, and I immediately went over. I wanted to talk to him more than the Hollywood, show business, communications people.
So I went over and talked to him, and I said, “Mr. Levitt, I’m Donald Trump.” He said, “I know.” I said, “Mr. Levitt, how are you doing?” He goes, “Not well, not well at all.” And I knew that. But he said, “Not well at all.” And he explained what was happening and how bad it’s been and how hard it’s been. And I said, “What exactly happened? Why did this happen to you? You’re one of the greats ever in our industry. Why did this happen to you?”
And he said, “Donald, I lost my momentum. I lost my momentum.” A word you never hear when you’re talking about success when some of these guys that never made 10 cents, they’re on television giving you things about how you’re going to be successful, and the only thing they ever did was a book and a tape. But I tell you — I’ll tell you, it was very sad, and I never forgot that moment.
And I thought about it, and it’s exactly true. He lost his momentum, meaning he took this period of time off, long, years, and then when he got back, he didn’t have that same momentum.
In life, I always tell this to people, you have to know whether or not you continue to have the momentum. And if you don’t have it, that’s OK. Because you’re going to go on, and you’re going to learn and you’re going to do things that are great. But you have to know about the word “momentum.”
But the big thing, never quit, never give up; do something you love.

The moral of the story seems to be about momentum: Trump says Levitt once had it and then he didn’t. The Levittowns were built and Levitt was well known but then his later projects and efforts did not go as well.

Three things strike me about this story. First, is this what is expected of hot shot or important developers? Berenson describes how Levitt funded many of his projects. The selling of homes in the first section or subdivisions in communities then funded later houses. If sales slowed, the project lagged. If sales were brisk – and they were particularly quick in the 1950s – then the project could flow along. Donald Trump also leverages previous assets to fund projects. Perhaps this is just the game is played in real estate but it might not be the way many average Americans operate.

Second, Berenson details the yachting/wealthy life Levitt lived. Levitt at one point had the third biggest yacht in the world. He and his wife entertained at some of the hottest social spots. This brings him into contact with numerous famous people. This includes people like Donald Trump – a younger developer – and politicians – like Joe Biden. He did this all with relatively little real wealth; his money was tied up and not really growing. When the money started running out, he did not have many options.

Third, what counts as positive or negative momentum? This particular story is told in such a way that there is a clear rise and fall: Levitt made it to the top and then dropped to the bottom. Most lives or careers may not fit this simple structure. People and businesses face obstacles, make progress, take a step forward and a step back. How many people could even somewhat closely fit a story of only positive momentum or only upward progress?

The importance of state laws in promoting racial integration in Willingboro, New Jersey

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In Perfect Communities: Levitt, Levittown, and the Dream of White Suburbia, historian Edward Berenson notes one important factor that led to racial integration in the Levittown community in New Jersey:

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What made Willingboro different was the existence of strong anti-discrimination state laws and courts willing to enforce them. Neither New York nor Pennsylvania had such laws when their Levittowns were being built. The New Jersey laws forced Levitt to drop his whites-only policy, and he decided that since integration was going to happen, it should unfold as smoothly as possible. Above all, Levitt wanted to avoid another situation like the one that greeted the Myerses in his Pennsylvania development, which had given Levitton a bad name both among white segregationists, who now saw Levittown’s whites-only promise as unreliable, and more liberal-minded people unwilling to live in a community known for racial antagonism. (156-157)

In his previous two communities, pressure brought by organizations and individuals was not enough to push Levitt to allow Black residents. But the conditions were different in New Jersey: the state had already acted. And the way it sounds above, Levitt wanted to both work with the different context and avoid bad publicity.

Thinking about residential segregation and housing issues more broadly, this approach – adopt state-wide policies – is still contentious today. Should a state be able to pass legislation that then limits the ability of local governments or developers to do what they want? Suburbanites tend to like local control; they move to the suburbs, in part, because the local ordinances and kinds of development can limit who might live there.

Earlier in the book, Berenson describes how Levitt said he limited his communities to whites because he was worried about how potential white buyers would respond to integrated communities. He might have been looking out for his bottom line but state legislation or policies could take a different or broader view.

Profile of a smaller post-World War II builder

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The efforts of Levitt & Sons are well known but here is a quick overview of a smaller “merchant builder” from the Boston area:

The Campanelli Brothers of Braintree, Massachusetts, were one of these typical merchant builders. When Michael, Joseph, Nicholas, and Alfred Campanelli created a construction company in the late 1940s, they were young and inexperienced. Their parents, Francesco Campanelli and Lisa Marie Colondono Campanelli, arrived in the U.S. in 1915 from a tiny and ancient mountain village in the Italian Apennines; they settled in an immigrant neighborhood in the small city of Brockton. The boys were used to hard work, quitting school after their father died to help support the family by working at the Quincy shipyards near Weymouth. Joseph also worked on some house construction sites before World War II. The three younger brothers served short stints in the Navy during the war.

After they came home, the brothers used an army surplus truck to move gravel to big construction sites, including Logan Airport. Soon they began pouring concrete footings for new buildings. As their assets increased, they built two new houses in Brockton, one for their mother and one for their sister Ann, whose husband, Salvatore De Marco, now joined the brothers’ team. They branched out to small developments near Braintree, Massachusetts, and Warwick, Rhode Island. Success there led them to develop more ambitious subdivisions in Natick, Framingham, Peabody, and other areas near Boston. In the process, they assembled a sizable group of foremen and loyal subcontractors, many drawn from their old neighborhood and earlier shipbuilding work. Their firm rapidly grew into the leading home building enterprise in the Boston area, and later built extensively in Florida and Illinois as well.

The typical Campanelli house was attractive because, as one buyer explained it, it was “a new kind of house” for “a new time.” It discarded the old-fashioned, larger, more monumental look. It had a low-pitched roof, like contemporary ranch houses in California, but still kept shutters or an occasional bow window for a faintly “colonial” flavor. Campanelli houses usually had two or three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen large enough to eat in, and a garage. The three-bedroom version was about 1,000 square feet of living space. In the mid-’50s, the firm extended the kitchens to form a “living kitchen” or a kind of a “family room.”

The last brother died just a few years ago and the company the brothers started did a lot of work:

Campanelli Companies built more than 30,000 single-family homes in eight states during the post-war period.

Here is the company – Campanelli – today and how they describe themselves:

Campanelli is a vertically integrated commercial real estate, construction, development and acquisitions company with over six decades of successful experience having developed, built and acquired over 20 million square feet of property. Campanelli has a trustworthy, successful and experienced team that maximizes value, consistently executes on target objectives and provides operational excellence for your company.

I would love to see a study that compares the (1) home styles (2) buyers (3) interactions with local governments and (4) organizational operations of a number of post-World War II builders. Campanelli started small and became a commercial property developer. Though there are differences, it kind of reminds me of the Harold Moser story in Naperville where a former newspaper owner turned lumber store operator started by building a few homes and then ended up constructing a sizable amount of the large city’s homes.

Additionally, are such family business stories like this still possible today or did the combination of unusual housing needs plus innovations in building create a uniquely open market?

A McMansion has been part of the American Dream for a while

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Teen Vogue suggests the historic American Dream involves a McMansion:

The mythic American Dream, defined by the wordsmiths at Merriam-Webster, is an “American social ideal that stresses egalitarianism and especially material prosperity.” We all know what that social ideal has looked like historically: a 9-5 job, two cars, two kids, and one McMansion complete with a white picket fence. It’s what your parents, grandparents, and probably even great-great-grandparents aspired to (though they probably didn’t use the term McMansion in the’50s — McDonalds was still at novelty back then).

But according a new poll conducted by Harvard’s Institute of Politics, 48% of millennials believe the American idyll is dead. More than 2,000 young Americans between 18 and 29 years old were interviewed about the government, the military, the future of the country, and the collective outlook on the future is…not great!

The caveat in the first paragraph may be important: people in the 1950s didn’t use the term McMansion as it didn’t really become widely used until the late 1990s (and yes, the Mc- prefix also wouldn’t have made much sense). But, did those post-war suburbanites really aspire to a McMansion, often defined as an overly large, poorly built home sitting on a small lot within the sprawling suburbs? Not really. Many of those early suburban single-family homes were quite modest in size. The Levittown homes were around 1,000 square feet and could even be purchased with unfinished second levels. In comparison, today’s new homes are roughly 2.5 times the size of the average new homes of the early 1950s. Many post-war suburban homes were mass produced but they weren’t considered garish or ostentatious. Were these new suburban homes better than many of the other housing options after World War II? Yes and there was indeed a real housing shortage. But, it is a real stretch to claim the American Dream always included a Mediterranean inspired 3,000 square foot home tightly packed into a small lot in a gated neighborhood.

The important new styles in American homes in the last few decades: shed, split-level, millennium mansions

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The recently updated A Field Guide to American Houses includes descriptions of three new home styles from recent decades:

Q: Is it harder to put new homes into defined categories? In other words, how do you determine what is a defined style and what isn’t?

A: When I first started the revision, I was almost overwhelmed by what seemed to be the fractured nature of new home design and wondered how I would ever figure out what I believed the defined categories were…

Q: We think of Italianate, Queen Anne or Craftsman, for example, as being classic, etched-in-stone styles. Do you think one day we’ll think in the same way of split-level, shed or millennium mansions, three of your new categories?

A: Yes, I do. Shed was a favorite style of architects in the ’60s and ’70s. It was taught in prominent architecture schools such as MIT and Yale and won a number of architecture awards, … and even appeared in house-pattern books for builders. Millennium mansions, on the other hand, dominated builders’ subdivisions in the 1990s and 2000s much in the way that ranch houses dominated builders’ subdivisions of the 1950s and ’60s.

Split-level was a brand new house shape, rather than style, and was most often used in the ranch, styled ranch or contemporary styles. It can be compared to American four-square, also a house shape, popular from about 1900 to 1920 that could be found in several different styles.

Whether critics like these new home styles or not, there were a lot of each of these three styles built. American homes aren’t quickly demolished so these homes are here to stay. This could lead to a few options:

1. A number of these homes could be significantly altered as homeowners add on, change the exterior and interior, redecorate, change the yards, and live full lives with lots of memories in these homes. I’m reminded of the homes of the Levittowns: while critics said they were “little boxes,” after several decades they had been altered quite a bit and the streetscapes included a variety of homes to look at. See the historical work Expanding the American Dream by Barbara Kelly.

2. Down the road, such styles will be revered and will eventually lead to preservation efforts. “We need to save that gaudy McMansion from the mid-1990s” – someone in 2030 might say.

3. Down the road, critics will still blast McMansions and these other new styles as unimaginative and wasteful. But, there may still be plenty of these homes.

4. Some new design will render these trends irrelevant or passe. McAlester looks forward in this interview to green homes but these homes doesn’t necessarily have to have a similar architectural design.