Begun in 1947 by Levitt & Sons on Long Island, Levittown applied assembly-line construction methods to produce thousands of nearly identical, affordable single-family houses at great speed. Marketed to a new white middle class backed by FHA and Veterans Administration loans, it became the archetype of postwar American suburbanisation. Like many developments of the era it explicitly excluded Black buyers through restrictive covenants. The model of mortgage-financed, car-dependent tract housing spread across the country.
Levittown epitomised the postwar suburban boom and the federally subsidised, racially exclusionary low-density growth that reshaped metropolitan America.
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