William J. Levitt, the Long Island developer who built the prototype for the suburbs that would lure middle-class Americans out of cities by the millions after World War II, died yesterday at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, L.I. He was 86.
He died of a progressive kidney disease, a hospital spokeswoman said.
In 1947, Mr. Levitt created Levittown, L.I, where in the next four years, his firm, Levitt & Sons, built more than 17,000 cheap, nearly identical 800-square-foot houses. The community, whose houses were built much like cars on an assembly line, was viewed by many as a modern marvel, a deliverance for G.I.'s returning from war and other young adults who normally could not have afforded suburban homes.
To others, it was the insidious archetype of a dehumanizing world of uniformity. In its early years, before many of the homes had been customized by their owners, some of its residents repainted their houses in odd color combinations to distinguish them from others in their neighborhoods.
Still, Mr. Levitt was proud of his innovations, which allowed his workmen to build as many as 36 houses a day on the design created by his brother, Alfred. "What it amounted to was a reversal of the Detroit assembly line," he said in a 1989 interview. "There, the car moved while the workers stayed at their stations. In the case of our houses, it was the workers who moved, doing the same jobs at different locations. To the best of my knowledge, no one had ever done that before."
Mr. Levitt went on to other huge developments, notably in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland, and to fabulous wealth. In 1968, Levitt & Sons was sold to the International Telephone and Telegraph Company for $92 million in I.T.T. stock, most of which went to Mr. Levitt. But he lost much of his wealth in the 1970's and 1980's in business deals gone sour.
Nonetheless, in 1985 Mr. Levitt and his father, Abraham, and brother, who were associated with him for much of his career, were called by a noted urban historian, Kenneth T. Jackson, the family that had the greatest impact on postwar housing in the United States.
Born Feb. 11, 1907, in Brooklyn, William Jaird Levitt attended Public School 44 and Boys High School. He studied for a time at New York University before becoming president of the construction company founded in 1929 by his father, a real estate lawyer. His building career was interrupted by World War II, when he served in the Navy Seabees.
At the end of the war, Mr. Levitt foresaw that the return of millions of young soldiers and sailors from abroad would jump-start the housing construction industry, which had been dormant since the start of the Depression. He bought up 7.3 square miles in Nassau County and created the first Levittown.
His great innovation was to have houses made of prefabricated elements that could be transported to any building site and assembled quickly by workers, each of whom performed one small task over and over. One Levitt employee did nothing but bolt washing machines to the floors.
A Flair for Sales
Mr. Levitt showed a flair for salesmanship, and for undercutting his competitors while still turning a profit. "Any damn fool can build homes," he once said. "What counts is how many can you sell for how little."
The end product exerted a powerful lure for young families of modest means in the early postwar years. Those families, typically headed by veterans, had often been obliged to squeeze into undersized apartments or to share crowded quarters with relatives in that housing-short era.
When the first mass-produced, two-bedroom houses were put on the rental market, would-be renters lined up to get them for $65 a month rent with an option to buy for $6,990 -- and no down payment required from veterans. Demand was so great that soon the price went to $7,990, and after 1949, they were available for sale only.
The fact that the Levitts used a single basic design -- the houses all had the same floor plan and dimensions, with slight variations in exterior features -- did not deter those home seekers, nor did the fact that Levittown sat 10 miles from the Queens border. In fact, the development, said to be the largest planned community in the country at the time, presaged the land rush to Nassau County, then still occupied largely by farms and the estates of the wealthy.
The first family to move into a Levitt house in the Long Island Levittown consisted of Theodore Bladykas, his wife, Patricia, and their twin baby daughters. They arrived on Oct. 1, 1947.
"We were proud," Mr. Bladykas, a construction-company executive, recalled in an interview in 1971. "It was a wonderful idea, a wonderful community -- and still is."
The Bladykases switched to roomier quarters, in Wantagh, in 1951, but two decades later Mr. Bladykas still vividly remembered his wife's rapture at moving into their Levittown Cape Cod cottage from their furnished apartment in Brooklyn. "She was jumping for joy, of course," he said.
Generated Loyalty
But Mr. Levitt took an unpretentious view of the specific management techniques involved. "This is a mud-on-your boots kind of business," he once observed. "You can't learn about it in a graduate school of business."
Mr. Levitt exerted a powerful influence on the shape of postwar America. The company's techniques generated enormous publicity, much of it centered on him, and Levitt & Sons was widely emulated. In the 1950's, as Jon C. Teaford, a historian at Purdue University, wrote in his 1986 book "The Twentieth-Century American City," "throughout the country every metropolitan area had its own version" of the Levitt family "building scores of houses along the suburban fringes."
Breaking new ground in his industry was a matter of intense pride to Mr. Levitt, who was a brash, restless man who gestured with gusto, seeming taller than his 5 feet 8 inches. "There's a thrill in meeting a demand with a product no one else can meet,"' he said in an interview in 1952 while he was working on the Pennsylvania Levittown.
"But I'm not here just to build and sell houses," he added. "To be perfectly frank, I'm looking for a little glory, too. It's only human. I want to build a town to be proud of."
Mr. Levitt duplicated the success of Levittown in the 1950's with Levittowns in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. His success continued after Alfred Levitt, who would die in 1966, left the company in 1954, and after the retirement of Abraham Levitt, the company chairman, who died in 1962.
But the dream of affordable housing was not for everyone, at least initially.
Mr. Levitt refused at first to sell to black people, a practice that made one of his projects, in Bowie, Md., the subject of demonstrations by civil rights groups in 1963. Mr. Levitt, who said that integrating his developments would put him at a competitive disadvantage, later relented, but decades later, many of the communities he built remained overwhelmingly white.
By the late 1960's, he was one of the richest men in America, the owner of a 237-foot yacht, La Belle Simone, named for his wife, and a 30-room mansion on his estate, La Colline, in Mill Neck, L.I. By his own estimate, he had built 140,000 houses.
But the 1968 sale of Levitt & Sons to I.T.&T., which had looked like a windfall, was a deal he came to regret. Barred from the construction business in the United State for 10 years by the terms of the sale, he embarked on projects in Iran, Venezuela, France, Israel and Nigeria, often with dismal results. And in the four years after selling his company, the I.T.&T. stock he received for it, which he had used as collateral for many of his ventures, lost almost 90 percent of its value, leaving him with enormous debts.
In the late 1970's and the 1980's, Mr. Levitt made several abortive attempts at a comeback, including two developments in Florida, in which he was forced to refund thousands of prospective home buyers' deposits because the homes were never built.
In 1981, the New York State Attorney General, Robert Abrams, charged that Mr. Levitt had illegally siphoned money from a charitable foundation created decades earlier by his family. Mr. Levitt eventually was forced to repay more than $5 million to the foundation.
By the late 1980's, the estate and yacht were gone, and Mr. Levitt, beset by age, infirmity and business setbacks, settled into restless retirement. He had been at North Shore University Hospital since July 1992, when he suffered a ruptured intestine, said his stepdaughter, Nicole Bernstein.
He is survived by Simone Levitt, his third wife, of Upper Brookville, L.I.; two sons, James Levitt of Devon, Pa. and William J. Levitt, Jr. of California; and three stepdaughters, Mrs. Bernstein of Manhattan, Denise Chernoff of Orlando, Fla. and Gaby Altman of Princeton, N.J.
