William J. Levitt

William J. Levitt was an American real-estate developer widely credited as the father of modern American suburbia. While he didn't invent the building of communities of affordable single-family homes within driving distance of major areas of employment, his innovations in providing affordable housing popularized this type of planned community in the years following World War II. Levitt & Sons chose an area known as Island Trees near Hempstead, Long Island as the site for its huge building project after the war.

The Company named it Levittown. Levitt's innovation in creating this planned community was to build the houses in the manner of an assembly line. In normal assembly lines, the workers stay stationary and the product moves down the line. In Levitt's homebuilding assembly line, the product (houses) obviously could not move. Residents started moving into Levittown, New York in 1947. Houses sold for between $8,000 and $12,000 with monthly payments as low as $57, a low price even by 1947 standards. The residents would come to be known as Levittowners.