Attend any number of presentations on the subject of “sprawl”
or read any number of articles denouncing it, and very often you’ll find the
example of Levittown USA being used as a case study in what not to do. The
1950s era mass-produced housing development has been pilloried by designers,
new urbanists, smart growthers and creative classists from the US to Europe to
Australia. Admittedly, its design when first completed was far from inspiring.
But the critics omit to mention some very important and enduring features of
Levittown, some of which we could use more of today.
Figure 1
Levittown USA in the 1950s
What is Levittown? It’s the name given to a number of post
World War II housing developments in New York and Pennsylvania. Developers the
Levitt family sought to provide low cost detached housing, especially for
servicemen returning from WWII and their families. Houses were manufactured
using a Henry Ford assembly line approach, with construction teams devoted to
particular components, allowing for an entire house to be built in as little as
a single day. Houses with land came with appliances installed, lawns and of
course a white picket fence. They sold like hotcakes.
Largely uniform designs on low cost land with efficient
building techniques were the keys to making these homes affordable. Keep in
mind, many residents were escaping cramped, unhealthy and relatively expensive
rented accommodation in New York urban tenements. For them, the hope offered by
a new home they could afford to own, with space around them, was a no contest
compared with the lifestyles they and their parents’ generations had known.
Figure 2
Urban living was a dystopian nightmare for residents of New York in the 1920s and
1930s. Cramped housing, disease, crime - all were rampant.
Figure 3
The opportunity to own their own home, with internal room and external space,
free from the conditions they and their parents had experienced, made Levittown
an obvious and logical choice.
But for urban design critics at the time, Levittown
represented everything they detested. The writer and urban critic Lewis Mumford
had this to say in his 1961 booked “The City in History”:
“…a multitude of
uniform and unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances,
on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same
class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television
performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same
freezers, conforming in every respect to a common mould.”
That set in train a repeating pattern of criticism over the
decades that followed, all of which seems to have two things in common: first, the
criticism is based on initial design (making next to no mention of the improved
housing conditions it provided, liberating a generation of families, nor the
affordable prices at which it could be purchased). Second, the criticism
reflects mainly the early days of Levittown. Indeed, the opening photo in this
article is the one I have seen used most in articles and at conferences where
scorn is freely piled upon Levittown. The image is 70 years old people! Why not
use a recent image to show what Levittown looks like today? Here’s one below
for example - which looks very much like
any middle-class suburban environment anywhere. Criticising projects like Levittown
in their very early days is a bit like criticising a 2 year old for their lack
of literacy and numeracy skills. Give it a rest.
Figure 4
Levittown today looks more like a bucolic scene of middle class suburban life.
Below is another image. Over time, owners have planted
trees, the area has matured, schools filled, community facilities established,
and transit connections improved. In fact, the demographic
profile of Levittown today is that of a healthy middle class, middle
income, well educated community with very high levels of home ownership (much
higher than the Australian average).
Figure 5
A matured Levittown community that the suburb
bashers never talk about
Levittown on opening day may not have been the most visually
appealing landscape imaginable, but to the people who bought and settled there,
they could no doubt see beyond the narrow view of wealthy urban critics like
Mumford. They could see a future for their families and a lifestyle free from
cramped and run-down housing, disease and urban crime.
Have we learned anything from Levittown? It doesn’t look
that way. The prevailing view of new suburban master planned communities today
has changed little from the ill-informed, jaundiced and smug denunciations
levelled at Levittown. New suburban communities are regarded by the inner urban
cognoscenti as some form of social aberration. This, they claim, is a condition
that needs curing. This can’t possibly be what people want. It can’t possibly
be good for them.
There are many modern-day versions of Lewis Mumford in
Australia, generating a steady torrent of suburban disdain like this from Sydney Morning Herald urbanist and
university professor Elizabeth Farrelly:
“The suburbs are about
boredom, and obviously some people like being bored and plain and predictable,
I’m happy for them … even if their suburbs are destroying the world.”
New suburban communities are wrongly accused of generating
city bound congestion (though fewer than 10% of residents work in the inner
city); they are accused of being environmentally irresponsible (yet they
provide public open space and parkland at many times the levels available in
inner cities); they are accused of being wasteful energy guzzlers (yet they are
more likely to generate their own rooftop solar and dry their clothes without
the aid of an electric dryer using instead the common clothesline); they are
accused of consuming valuable farmland (though it is often marginal and the
accusers have little understanding of farming realities); they are accused of
catering for poorly educated, low income, fast food guzzling masses (though the
demographic picture provided by the Census shows this to be entirely untrue);
and they are accused of creating social isolation, loneliness and ill health
(which even the most tortured methodology in the hands of the most ardent
suburb hater couldn’t come close to proving).
Unattributed, unscientific, hearsay is accepted “wisdom” in
so many circles that it is easy to despair. Evidence is out the window and in
its place are unchallenged but fashionable belief systems. Faith over facts. It’s
as if we are sick with urban prejudice but are only being able to choose between
the witchdoctor, the anti-vaccer or the Chinese herbalist for remedies.
New suburban communities have much to offer Australia. If we
simply sought to understand them better, we might begin to support them better
too. Affordable housing in new suburban communities is surely an option people
are entitled to aspire to? How many really aspire to a permanent life of
renting in cramped conditions?
Levittown was popular with working and middle class
Americans in post war America. It provided low cost homes and a better future
for its residents, who busily went about planting trees and building their own
community over time. It provided a start.
New suburban developments deserve the
same opportunity to provide these things to a generation of Australians. They
can do without the moral guidance, partisan bias or professional snobbery of
“experts” or the opinions of the inner urban cabal who wax lyrical on the need
for affordable or social housing yet in the next breath reject models which
could provide it.
The Suburban Alliance has commissioned some indepedent research into what mature masterplanned communities are really like, compared with the inner city. The report and two minute video summaries can be found here: https://suburbanalliance.com.au/causes/a-new-suburbia-case-studies-of-successful-suburban-expansion/
