The Rise of Suburbia in the 1950s: Levittown and the American Dream

Rise of the Living Standards

• Assembly-line construction techniques applied to houses or “little boxes”.
• Increase in car ownership.
• The 1956 Interstate Highways Act → new roads.
• Existence of long-term low-interest mortgages (Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944).

Racial factors: The “white flight,” e.g., Levittown (racial housing discrimination, redlining, and Mortgage discrimination)

Levittown: The Imperfect Rise of the American Suburbs

By Crystal Galyean --  In 1947, entrepreneur Abraham Levitt and his two sons, William and Alfred, broke ground on a planned community located in Nassau County, Long Island. Within a few years, the Levitts had transformed the former farmland into a suburban community housing thousands of men— many of whom were veterans returned from World War II—and their families. The Levitts would go on to create two other communities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and the legacy of the first Levittown has become a legend in the history of the American suburbs. Even at the time, the iconic community represented for many all that was hopeful and wholesome for the estimated twenty million Americans who followed Levittown’s lead and made the trek to suburbia in the 1950s.

Suburbia in the American Historical Imagination

The suburbs, of course, were not born in the 1950s. The appeal of living beyond the noise, pollution, overcrowding, and disease of the city, while still close enough to enjoy the benefits of its industrial and cultural vitality, is an idea that historians have traced back thousands of years to the very first civilizations. But the delineation between urban and nonurban has particular significance in U.S. history. So much of the American story has involved, literally and ideologically, turning away from the crowded industry of the city to the romantic beauty of the frontier. Thomas Jefferson, for example, dreamed of the U.S. as a nation of small yeoman farmers and once wrote that he viewed “large cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.”

Despite Jefferson’s vision, cities in the U.S. formed and flourished. Starting in the early nineteenth century, the advent of new forms of transportation (such as trains and steamboats) made commuting to urban centers more convenient. By the 1920s, the first suburban boom was occurring with nearly 900,000 new homes a year springing up in new communities outside city lines. Just like Thomas Jefferson had dreamed of farmers with their own land to sow as an essential ingredient of America’s future, home ownership became not only a mark of success but was perceived as an attribute to both the character of the individual and of the nation. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt said later in the century, “A nation of homeowners, of people who own a real share in their land, is unconquerable.”