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biography
| name: |
Levitt, William J(aird)
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1907–94)
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| biography:
| Builder, born in New York City, New York, USA. After study at New York University, with his brother and father he formed Levitt & Sons (1929), a construction company. Serving as president and managing the business operations, it successfully built nearly 3000 houses in its first 11 years. The firm built mass-produced housing for the US Navy during World War 2 and found a successful civilian adaptation in Levittown, Long Island, NY, where he built 17 500 small but equipped, landscaped, and affordable houses and associated public and community buildings (1947–51). A second Levittown in Bucks Co, PA, followed. He called his firm ‘the General Motors of the housing industry’, but attracted controversy for racially discriminatory sales policies (upheld by the Pennsylvania courts, 1955). He sold the company to International Telephone and Telegraph in 1968. His later career was marred by failures in foreign projects in the 1970s, and by three disastrous Levittown-style Florida projects in the 1980s and accusations of misappropriation of funds. |
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