(7 of 7)
How much the Levitts make on each house is a closely guarded secret. Most guesses put the net at more than $1,000 a house, or better than $5,500,000 on this year's Levittown houses. Says Bill: "I don't like to be associated with anything that doesn't make money."
Strangely enough, the biggest house builder in the U.S. has built no house for himself. In winter he lives with his pretty wife Rhoda and their two sons, Bill Jr., 17, and Jimmy, 5, in a twelve-room Fifth Avenue apartment, which he rents for $4,900 a year. Summers they spend at Great Neck, L.I., in an English Tudor mansion (which Levitt rents for $7,500 a season) which has both a swimming pool and a private bathing beach on Long Island Sound. On summer weekends Bill sometimes plays golf (low 90s) with wife Rhoda (low 80s) but is not disturbed by his constant defeats. Says he: "I hate all forms of exercise." He has little interest in anything not connected with building, seldom reads anything but the newspapers and magazines. To visitors in his office Bill Levitt likes to hand out copies of his favorite book, Elbert Hubbard's Message to Garcia.
How Long? By 1951 Levitt & Sons expect to build another 10,000 Levittown houses. But whether the Levitts, or all of the other builders, will build as many houses as they plan depends on how long the housing shortage—and the housing boom—lasts. Last week the Department of Commerce estimated that about two-thirds of the pent-up housing demand has already been filled. However, said the department, the "remaining backlog is still large and appears sufficient to warrant construction close to the recent yearly rates for [another] three years."
That seemed a conservative prediction, if the big builders like Levitt could keep on thinking up new mass-production tricks, and small merchant builders could adapt more of them to their operations, thus broadening the market for small, cheap houses. By stabilizing the construction industry, builders could offer more permanent work to labor, and thus eliminate the cause of the featherbedding that now adds so much to building costs. And as efficiency increased, the mass builders might also find that they could economically supply some of the individuality that their houses now lack.
Bill Levitt himself has few fears for the house-building future. He thinks that the U.S. will build 1,000,000 houses a year for the next few years; then the rate will drop to 500,000 or 600,000 a year. Says he: "That's a big drop from what we're doing now, but it's still good business."