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The name of a number of suburban neighborhoods built for white World War II veterans by the famous developer William Levitt. Often considered the father of the postwar housing boom, Levitt was the first to build large-scale neighborhoods full of mass-produced, nearly identical, affordable single-family homes that sold for only a few thousand dollars at the time (or around $75,000 in 2017 dollars). These Levittowns were intentionally segregated with restrictive covenants, both because of Levitt’s personal biases and because the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration would not insure mortgages for African Americans. As a result, even African American war veterans who helped build the neighborhoods—like Robert and Vince Mereday—were unable to move to Levittown and had to live in black neighborhoods like Lakeview instead. Rothstein points out that this had severe long-term consequences: while their purchase prices were the same in 1948, a Levittown home is now worth three times much as a Lakeview one.
Levittown Quotes in The Color of Law
The The Color of Law quotes below are all either spoken by Levittown or refer to Levittown. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 9
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“N_____ have moved into Levittown!”
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Levittown Term Timeline in The Color of Law
The timeline below shows where the term Levittown appears in The Color of Law. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 4: “Own Your Own Home”
...as employees, Robert Mereday hoped to buy a house in a suburb, like the famous Levittown that his company helped build. But he knew that he could not because he was...
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...[who] created entire suburbs” that, to get loans, had to exclude black people. The “visionary” Levittowns, full of comfortable homes for war veterans, are a characteristic example of this. Levitt got...
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Chapter 5: Private Agreements, Government Enforcement
...prospective suburban developers write this into deeds before insuring their mortgages. This happened in Rollingwood, Levittown, and numerous other suburbs Rothstein has mentioned so far in his book, and the VA...
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Chapter 9: State-Sanctioned Violence
...I, Rothstein tells a similar story in Pennsylvania, where Robert Mereday helped build a second Levittown. His son’s girlfriend and her family tried to move there but could not, which Rothstein...
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In 1957, a middle-class black veteran named Bill Myers moved to Levittown, Pennsylvania with his family, supported by a private loan from “a New York City philanthropist.”...
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Chapter 11: Looking Forward, Looking Back
Rothstein illustrates this with an example: in 1948, Levittown homes cost the equivalent of $75,000 (in 2017 dollars), and Vince Mereday’s home in the...
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Chapter 12: Considering Fixes
...instance, the government would buy “the next 15 percent of houses that come up in Levittown” and “resell [them] to qualified African American borrowers for $75,000.” Rothstein notes that this would...
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