After the Levittowns

In the postwar housing boom, Builder William Jaird Levitt's 17,000-house Levittowns--on Long Island and in Pennsylvania--came to symbolize an era of mass-produced, look-alike homes. Though they made Levitt & Sons the nation's largest home builders, the Levittowns were sneered at by esthetes, spoofed by cartoonists, massively aped by other builders. His old image lingers on, but Levitt, now 60, has stayed at the top of the $25 billion industry by changing his whole approach to housing.

Cheaper in Clusters. Instead of monolithic developments, Levitt today has eleven neighborhood-size communities of varied styles and prices ($16,000 to $33,000) rising from Long Island to Cape Kennedy--plus operations in Puerto Rico and France. Last month he broke ground for subdivisions near Baltimore and Chicago, the latter his first venture in the Midwest. Earlier this year, he started the first of a contemplated chain of ten home-furnishing stores called Levittmark, Inc., at his Willingboro, N.J., development, 15 miles from Philadelphia. Two weeks ago at Willingboro, he opened his first colony of town houses--today's euphemism for attached, one-family homes. Priced from $12,990 to $16,990, the town houses put Levitt back into a market that few builders still serve: that comprising families earning as little as $7,000 a year. Levitt keeps the prices low by clustering the houses on tiny lots around common courtyards and greens, thus cutting the cost of roads and utilities. That also enables him to leave 75% of the land open for parks, play space and a pool.

Through such activities, Levitt's sales climbed to an estimated $94 million in the company's latest fiscal year and profits rose to an estimated $3,900,000. Levitt figures that his firm has built 75,000 houses worth $1.1 billion, including 4,300 last year. This year he expects to build another 5,200. "The job gets easier as we get larger," says Levitt. "There are no brains in this business. Once the management problem is solved, you can do almost anything."

Beyond the Suburbs. Brooklyn-born Levitt, who began building houses on Long Island in 1929 with his late father Abe and his late brother Alfred, solved his management problem painfully. After losing $763,155 in 1961, he decentralized his operations, surrounded himself with youthful aides (the average age of his five senior vice presidents is 43), began training second-echelon executives because "there's no place for us to steal talent from." Wall Street has responded to Levitt's resulting 20%-a-year growth by lifting the price of Levitt & Sons stock on the American Stock Exchange from a low of $4 a share in 1963 to $24.88 at week's end. His own 66% holdings are worth $50 million.

Levitt's preoccupation today, as he guides his widening empire from an opulent headquarters at Long Island's Lake Success, is creating a new city of a size hitherto only dreamed of: 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 population. It would sprout in 50,000-people installments on a still-secret site in the countryside "where the air is still as God made it." Only by this kind of leap beyond the suburbs, Levitt persuasively argues, can the urbanizing U.S. remain fit to live in as it doubles its present physical plant over the next 35 years. To solve the job problem, he has been dickering with the heads of several major corporations that could put factories in his city. "I have no intention of retiring," says Levitt. "My life is a vacation, and rest I don't need."

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