The Development Of Levittown, New York Essay - 1340 Words

The development of Levittown, New York thrived based on the use of exclusionary methods, the most important and notable being restrictive covenants. As of the late 1960s, out of the eighty-two thousand residents in Levittown barely any of them were African American (Jackson). One of the actors involved in the restrictive covenants in the newly developed suburb was the developers. Bill Levitt’s company only sold their houses to white buyers, even though housing segregation was unconstitutional since 1948 in the United States. David Kushner’s Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb provides the verbiage of the lease contracts in Levittown, â€Å"the tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be sued or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race† (Kushner 43). The lease verbiage indicates the developers intentions to maintain their developments all-white. Although the intentions of the developer may be simply stated as racist ideology, it is more accurate to note that their racial segregation was decided on economic terms. The developers feared that communities that housed African Americans would be less desirable to the greater population, meaning lower property values for the homes in their suburbs. The most important aspect to real estate developers is the profit. Unfortunately, during the time Levittown’s construction racial segregation was a desirable concept for the majority of white Americans,Show MoreRelatedLevittown Experiment Essay1083 Words   |  5 PagesLevittown Experiment Levittown project was taken up in the U.S. after the end of Second World War, with the aim of providing mass housing facilities to people in the wake of increasing urbanization and problems of accommodating large population in limited urban area (Friedman. 1995). 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