Levittown/Concord Park: Utopia in Our Backyard

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They build a plan, pull from secure data sources, run sub agents in parallel, and draft the work product ready for your review. So you delegate the work and on the judgment. Trusted by more than 60% of the AMLA 100 and leading Fortune 500 legal teams, Harvey is the AI operating system designed specifically for legal work. Harvey AI tailored for law. Learn more at Harvey.AI. Every time someone asks me where I'm from, it's a bit of a routine. The answer is the same and the reaction is the same. First, I puff up my chest and I tell them I'm from New York. They excitedly ask me where. And then I tuck my tail between my legs as I can see. Well, just outside the city. I'm from Westchester. It's the suburbs. No doubt about it. It's where the Manhattan commuter trains go. And yes, that is how my dad got to his office and how I tried and failed to go out to clubs when I was a teenager. Such a cliche. Lady Gaga once said that the worst rumor about her is that she's from Westchester. It's not cool. But throughout the 20th century, for many Americans, Suburbia was the dream. The American dream of home ownership, your own little utopia, with all it entails. And guess what? This wonderful home comes with appreciation and equity. This is Dorothy Brown, a professor at Emory University School of Law. And she says Suburbia didn't start out with a reputation of blandness and emptiness. Quite the opposite. The prospect of home ownership was full of promise. It represented individual security and freedom. White picket fences, a white house, and the wife waves goodbye to the husband as he goes off to work. And she stays home to take care of the children. So Suburbia is this kind of utopia if you're white. Yeah, the suburbs where I grew up were pretty white. So this benign language of encouraging home ownership, it's the American thing to do. It's really code for it's what we want white people to do. At the center of the American dream is some very American institutionalized racism. And this is where the vision of the suburbs went off the rails. And it makes you wonder if it's possible to forge a new path on the same old tracks. This is nice try, a podcast from Curved. This first season is called Utopian. It's about the perpetual search for a perfect place, which, according to the etymological roots of the very word utopia, does not, in fact, exist. I'm your host, Avery Truffleman, and in pop culture, from Leave It To Beaver to John Hughes movies, Suburbia is presented as a caricature of itself, penned in its own white-picket fence. But it's not like that cliche just came from our collective imagination. It came, in large part, from a real place called Levittown. This is Levittown, Pennsylvania, with its giant shopping center, winding lanes, named for flowers and trees. It is fairly typical of communities all over America, where families are pursuing the American dream to give their children a better chance in life. This is from a 1957 documentary called Crisis in Levittown. As even the documentary alludes to in its descriptions, back when it was first created, Levittown was the epitome, the definition, the symbol of Suburbia, in all its promise and exclusivity. William Levitt and his real estate development firm, Levitt & Sons, built not just one, but four planned communities, all called Levittown, each located just outside of a crowded city, but close enough to transportation hubs that can take you right back into the fray. The first was started around 1947, just after World War II in Long Island, New York. The second Levittown arose in Pennsylvania in 1952, then a third in New Jersey and a fourth in Puerto Rico. Each Levittown had its own theme, but within each, the houses looked more or less the same, for really good reason. The architecture of the houses in Levittown is varied enough to eliminate dreary monotony, while at the same time enough I like to permit the savings that result from standardization. Newsreel advertisements for Levittown, like that one, made it a selling point. Standardization meant cost savings. William Levitt churned out homes like Ford churned out cars on an assembly line. Workers would move from houses to house in a development, each doing one task repeatedly, like there was one guy whose job it was to screw in washing machines over and over. As early as 1948, Levitt was erecting 30 houses a day. It was fast, and it was cheap, because Levitt cut out middlemen, bought materials directly, and even opened his own factories to produce his own nails. And he also kept prices low by doing stuff like freezing out unions. And the result. So here's the home that cost its happy owners just $9,000. Today, that's around $95,000, which is about a third of the current median home price in America, so not bad. And suspend your judgment of semi-same suburbia for a minute. As the newsreel points out, these homes had a lot of great features. And that includes such extras as a completely equipped kitchen, a two-way fireplace, a fitness room in the attic, and even a washing machine. Levitt town homes had built-in TVs. And also, my favorite feature, they had radiant heating, meaning they had heated floors. Can you imagine how lovely that would be to wake up on a winter day, and your slippers are already toasty? Like, what, a pleasant little nest to settle in? And there was another reason all these small luxuries became accessible. It wasn't just Levitt's building and buying techniques that made homes more affordable. The United States government enabled it. It was politically wise to build a nation of homeowners. The idea is, homeownership is a good thing. There's research that shows homeowners take care of their property or involved in their neighborhood or politically active, especially in the lurking face of communism. Home ownership kept Americans invested in their own property and individual well-being. As FDR said, a nation of homeowners is unconquerable. So the government decides to give Americans the tools they need to buy homes quickly and affordably. Post World War II, we had the federal government through the Federal Housing Administration creating a new mortgage product, which is something that we take for granted. It was the 30-year low-interest fixed rate mortgage. Long-term mortgages. This is how practically everyone buys homes now. But back then, it was totally new. People used to pay cash for their homes or buy them on short-term loans with huge down payments. The long-term low-interest mortgage was a powerful change for white people. You had the FHA underwriters manual, which basically said they wouldn't sell to blacks. So while white families had access to low-interest mortgages, black home buyers had to get uninsured mortgages with higher interest rates if they were able to get mortgages at all. Many black families bought homes on contract, like an installment plan, meaning that if they missed one payment, they could lose the roof over them. And then they were trapped where they were until they could pay it all off and full. It was part of a much bigger framework of insidious practices around the country, all making it harder for black families to buy homes. Now, what's the theory behind that? The theory behind that is the presence of blacks depreciates home values. It's built on racism. Racism was built into the suburbs. In the same way, radiant heating was built into the floors of Levittown homes. It's set up at the very foundation. And as the market grows, the wiring gets covered up, but you can still feel it. You can touch the floor, and it will be hot. I think about this question often. Is it that whites have an aversion to live next door to blacks just because they're racist? Or is it a defensive economic protection strategy and the The bottom line is it really doesn't matter if it's A or B, black homeowners that are left out are disadvantaged. Levittown blatantly, as a policy, was all white. The first Levittown in New York had a clause in the lease agreements in bold letters that read, "Your house could not be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race." Because all white neighborhoods were the good business choice, supposedly to keep homes from losing value. A 1948 Supreme Court case outlawed racial covenants and housing agreements, but Levitt continued to block black families from buying new homes throughout the 1960s. Levitt defended the whiteness of his developments, saying, "Infimously, we can solve a housing problem or we can try to solve a racial problem, but we can't do both." However, another contemporary developer begged to differ, begged and pleaded to differ. That's after the break. Hi, I'm Neil Abitel, Editor-in-Chief of the Verge, and Dakota is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web, and how Cloudflare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up. We pulled all that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when just a few months later in May, the team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic has now passed human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy, and if you extrapolate that out five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online. This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Dakota wherever you get your podcast. This series is presented by EY. Start for the show comes from Pipedrive. Sales teams spend up to 50% of their time on admin work, rather than selling, building relationships and closing deals. Pipedrive gives them that time back. It's the intelligent AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipedrive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before your meeting, it pulls deal history and past conversations into one brief. During the call, it records and takes notes. After, it auto-drops the CRM updates, ready for you to review and approve. Head to pipedrive.com/fox to get started and get an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14-day trial. No credit card or payment needed. Oh my gosh, that is a white picket fence. That's my swing set, it's a basketball hoop. Our charming producers, Megan Kanane and Diana Buds, took a little chip to the Pennsylvania Levitown. Oh, so we're driving on Levitown Parkway. And then, when they were done looking around Levitown, Diana and Megan got back in the car, and they drove for just 20 minutes, and eight miles away, they reached another suburb. Oh, let the birds in. And this suburb looks exactly like Levitown. It feels like we have not driven anywhere. Wow. And even though it has seemingly identical houses, this suburb was not built by Levit. This was built to be the anti-Levitown, a little parallel universe through the looking glass. It's a development called Concord Park, and was founded in 1954 with a radically mundane mission. To see if the suburbs could be truly integrated, if individual utopias could be truly accessible to everyone, white, and black. So when my father asked me for the emptying time to join his firm, I said I would on the condition I could build housing for everybody. This is the voice of Morris Milgram, as heard in an undated audio cassette from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Milgram was the developer of Concord Park. He was born in New York City in 1916 to Russian-Jewish parents, and he was raised to be an activist. Some of his earliest memories were going to socialist rallies. He was the last person you'd expect to grow up to become a housing developer. But he chose his vocation for a reason. Milgram was really compelled by a poem written by activist lawyer and author Paulie Murray. The poem, called Dark Testament, had in it three lines about the sons of the slave traitors, and said, "Traders still trade in double talk, though they've swept the sewing block for ghetto and gun." And after I read this poem, I found about 50 times, it got through my thick skull, that the ghetto was the modern-day technique for perpetuating the second-class status of black people in our society. I started asking questions and discovered that the builders in Philadelphia were building housing for white people only. Milgram began building homes in the early 50s, so he was working within the exact same system as Levitt, the same government-sponsored long-term mortgages, the same white homeowners eager to live in all white suburbs all worried about maintaining the value of their homes. When Morris Milgram came up with the idea for a racially integrated development, it was nearly impossible to get money for it. Milgram tried 20 different banks before one agreed to finance mortgages for black buyers. Milgram and his business partner, George Otto, assembled a board of six white men and three black men. And by August 1954, they finally had financing for 59 acres and 139 houses to sell. I mean, not enough to single-handedly fix the system of racist housing. It was very much supposed to be a model. This is Amanda Colson Hurley, senior editor of CityLab, an author of Radical Suburbs, experimental living on the fringes of the American city. She wrote about Conquer Park, the idea was that it could be replicated but also offered a model of what America could and should be like. This would be especially exciting for black home buyers. To give you an idea of how few options they had, between 1946 and 1953, less than 1% of the homes on the market in the Philadelphia area were available to black buyers. The hurdle for Conquer Park and Milgram would be attracting white buyers. He was nervous that white people wouldn't come. This in part is why Conquer Park looks exactly like Levitown to mock it in a way and also to compete with it. Making the design of the homes as familiar as possible was a way to reassure them that hey, you're not moving into some kind of hippy-dippy experiment. Your house will retain its value and appreciate and value just as if you moved anywhere else. There's only this difference that your neighbors will not all be white and that's it. Morris Milgram actually hired the same stylist who did the interiors of the Levitown homes to do the Conquer Park model homes. These homes also had radiant heating in a built-in laundry hamper and the whole works. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall and seen and heard some of the conversations happening in the model home, especially when some of these white home buyers turned up and what they would say when they found out about the policy. If you were a fly on the wall, you'd see a lot of white people coming in to see the homes, barely any of them putting deposits down. It was starting to look like integration was an impossible goal, but Milgram wouldn't accept it. I think he even advertised in liberal and quaker publications with ads that would say, "Here's an opportunity to sort of live out your values, kind of put your money where your mouth is, type of messages." Then someone on Milgram's board had an idea. To make sure Conquer Park could stay on track as an integrated community, they wouldn't state a quota. Milgram suggested it be divided 50/50, but the board decided it had to be 55 to 45. 25% white and 45% black because it ensured a white majority, which they thought was unfortunately really important to the success of the model. All to ensure white buyers that their homes would retain value. So Milgram showed off this quota he was enforcing. He had a map of Conquer Park up on his wall, in the office where you'd go to put down a deposit, and he had pins in the map. These different pins, like kind of color-coded pins, they were not black and white, I think they were red and blue or something. When a contract was signed, he would sort of put a pin in the map, and he'd be looking at this map constantly trying to make sure that balance was maintained. At first the map had far more blue pins than red, which meant the black families who put down deposits already had to wait to have their houses built. Wait until the quota was achieved. And so they waited, some waited six months, some a year, some long, but all the families got housed. Our next job was to find the whites, and that was much tougher. And for white buyers, the barrier for entry would be much lower. Of course, the black homeowners had to be so much more extraordinary than their white counterparts, simply to compete for the same mortgages. The black buyers had higher median incomes than the white buyers. I wasn't that also part of making white people comfortable though. I do think that there was an element. of appeasing white anxiety about integration was that they would not have to live next to a black person of lower social status than themselves. In fact, they were of higher social status. Milgram's quota and pins were essentially his versions of racial zoning and covenants, tools that were historically exclusionary. Milgram tried to use his tools as a force for good, but ultimately still denied homes to some black people. The methods that built Concord Park were fraught and extremely problematic. But for a moment, they did actually turn Concord Park into everything Milgram wanted. - It was a utopia because we, all the children here, we thought this was the most wonderful thing we had everything at our fingertips. - Joyce Hadley grew up in Concord Park, and she says you could not imagine a more utopian suburb. All the dads got together to build a playground, and kids would run into each other's houses for dinner, unannounced and welcome. White and black families, all living in harmony. - The bubble, I call the bubble because when we moved outside of this community, that's when the race is, and that's when we were all hit with the race. Outside we were known as checkered board square, black and white. Well, that was fine because we knew that what we were doing was wonderful, we were proud of who we were. Inside the bubble, Joyce said that one resident had such a beautiful voice that she'd wander around singing opera, and neighbors would open their windows to listen. There was a puppet theater in town, and it would lead all the children in song. - And the song that every one of us took from this Wonderland puppet theater to this day, because we've had reunions and all of us, all of us sing. The things you don't understand are the things that you're afraid of, but you're no longer afraid when you find out what they're made of. - It sounds so simple and beautiful to hear Joyce talk about it. Like, yeah, why are we making housing so racist and complicated when we could all just be getting along and watching puppet theater together? - The New York Times ran a story, and I think the headline was "Subber breaks racial barrier," and it's very interesting that the paper also reported in large print, no incidents have occurred, you know? So clearly there was this idea that, you know, readers out there reading about this might be asking, are there must have been ugly incidents? - Because that is exactly what happened in Levittown, the twin suburb eight miles from Concord Park. After that 1948 Supreme Court ruling, outlawing racial covenants, Levitt couldn't prevent the original homeowners from selling their houses to non-whites. And so the first black family, the Myers, bravely moved to Levittown. This was in 1957. - Daisy Myers was the wife there, and they had a hell of a time, I'll use that word, a hell of a time, living there. - The Myers faced death threats. Levittowners threatened to plant bombs in their home. Daisy Myers was terrified to be home alone while her husband was at work. So Concord Park neighbors, black and white, rallied around the Myers. - Many of the fathers from this community had to go and sit on the lawn of the Myers home so that those people would not be killed because they were throwing rocks. It was a constant barrage of cars going up and down the street in front of their home, making all types of racial comments to them. It was just a horrific thing. - The Concord Park Civic Association also penned a letter to Levittown. - It says to our neighbors in Levittown, we are residents of an interracial community, situated only eight miles from Levittown, nearly half of our 139 families are Negro. We have lived here for more than two years peacefully. We believe on the basis of our own experience that there is only one thing to do and that is to welcome this family as you would any other family and especially to refrain from action which undermines the good and democratic name of your community. - In 1957, Concord Park was like a parallel world. An alternative idea of what our suburban template could have been like. And so Milgram decided to do it again, this time in Deerfield, Illinois. When Milgram's plans went public, the headline in the local paper read, "Interracial subdivision planned inside Deerfield limits." Residents were livid. Here was the social outsider threatening their home values and they fought back. The town approved a plan to seize Milgram's land by eminent domain and build a park. Milgram sued them and lost. A federal district judge called Milgram's quota system an illegal plan that would lead to controlled or forced integration. The Deerfield integrated suburb was a real bonafide failure and for the same reason Concord Park was able to integrate that quota. - The quota definitely, you know, was uneasy about that from the beginning and I think remained uneasy about it and certainly recognized it as a very imperfect methodology to use in building or populating, you know, this community that he had built. And soon Milgram's methodology went from imperfect to illegal nationwide. In 1968, the Fair Housing Act outlawed racial discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing. It passed Congress just six days after the assassination of Martin Luther King. So all developers, including Milgram, lost their overt control over who could buy homes in their communities. Of course, they found other ways to discriminate. But the law did mean that more black families were able to buy homes in suburban neighborhoods around the country. And more white families fled those neighborhoods, seeking majority elsewhere. Although they'd probably say they were just looking for a bigger house. - There were probably further out suburbs that were newer and, you know, might have bigger houses. A lot of inner suburbs kind of suffer from, you know, that problem of sort of this leapfrog development that then draws away, you know, potential residents to these further out places. - Even the biggest houses in Concord Park only had one bathroom. The American excerpts were booming with huge rolling lawns and multi-car garages. So because they had a choice and because so many of their contemporaries were moving out, white suburbanites went shopping for their next investment. Concord Park residents included. - The one thing that Morris Milgram could not control, he can have a quota to start with. But, you know, he could not control every resale as people moved away. In the '60s and '70s, as white homeowners left, more black buyers moved in. Concord Park became majority black. - Newspapers kind of said, this is the death of Morris Milgram's dream. This is the end of his experiment and kind of it has failed. Milgram did ultimately fail in his attempt to create a model for a replicable integrated suburb where everyone's homes go up in value. The methods he used were problematic. But beyond that, the racism he was trying to fight in the housing market was just too hard-wired and it still is. - What was true then and what is true now and what the research shows is because the majority of home buyers have always been white. Their racial preferences are baked into the real estate market. - The deeply rooted racism in our real estate market shapes our communities today and so many complicated, painful ways. But to say Concord Park itself is a failure. That's not fair. It's not even true. - I have traveled extensively, but there's nothing like Concord Park. I've never seen another neighborhood as wonderful as Concord Park. Joyce still lives in the home her parents bought back in the '50s. In 1987, when Joyce's mother passed away, some of her friends got her a cherry blossom tree and it blooms every spring right outside her window. It's a reminder of the people who made this community a home. Concord Park is lovely and it's more integrated than it's ever been. Now it's a community that attracts people from all over the world. Families from Central America and Africa and Asia are all living side by side. So in a way, Concord Park now reflects this great diversity of American suburbia. - You see it all across the country, outside any major city. And the Stripmo multiplexes showing films and Tamil, dead shopping centers being revived into places like Plaza Fiesta outside of Atlanta or Little Sagan outside of San Jose. A lot of this diversity is by necessity, as white buyers snap up properties downtown. But it's also because our country is becoming more multiracial generation by generation. And here's the thing, all white cookie cutter levitown is the exception, not the rule in the long, long history of the suburbs. - I mean, there was always this real diversity of community types and of ways of living in suburbia that has just sort of been forgotten over time. In her book Radical Suburbs, Hurley notes that the suburbs have had a long, colorful history. The ancient city of Ur had suburbs that stretched for miles. And in the middle ages, outcast groups like prostitutes and leopards were relegated to dwell sub-urbs, literally below the city. The suburbs have often been less regulated and more affordable. - Often there was a more extensive plots of land that you could buy for not that much money. money if you were interested in designing a new town or founding a kind of experimental community. Housing and home ownership has been wildly unfair to Black Americans. The way it's reared its head in suburbia is really just the tip of the iceberg. And given that this has been going on for well more than half a century, whatever the solution is isn't going to come overnight and in the interim, you've got to figure out what you want to do if you want to buy a house. Because the security of having your own home, your own space, that is a utopia. Your chance to make a perfect place, a little nook in the world where you can feel safe. And my shame about the suburbs that comes from privilege, my hometown nourished me in a lot of ways. If suburbia is the American dream, I got pretty close. That utopia is still inaccessible to so many Americans. The system failed. Or rather, it's working by design. In 2017, the rate of Black home ownership in the US was just over 1% higher than it was in 1970, almost 50 years after the Fair Housing Act. This is what we have to show for it. As Professor Dorothy Brown says, this is not a system that can be dismantled overnight, and it stretches far past suburbia. But maybe one small step towards change could be seeing suburbia in its full history as an experiment. Not a tiki tacky set of houses, or energy inefficient sprawl, or a known place to write off with casual embarrassment. The suburbs are ever evolving. They are a place of change. They need to be. It was a communal living arrangement, but shared money, food, land, and spouses. Yes, it was polyamory. It was communism, and before all your friends were talking about them, way before, like mid-1800s, a community that freed women from their bourgeois housework and allowed them to labor alongside men, sporting pants and short hair, and then this commune turned into a corporation, a very successful one, all around you today. But that's for next week. Thanks to Lauren Swan and Karen Miles for sharing their memories of Concord Park with us. Also thanks to Jean Milgram for talking to us about his father and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania for letting us sift through their Morris Milgram collection. Much of our research for this episode was informed by the color of law, a forgotten history of how our government segregated America by Richard Rothstein, the price of paradise, the costs of inequality, and a vision for a more equitable America by David Trout, and second suburb, Love It Town, Pennsylvania, edited by Diane Harris. And of course, Amanda Colson Hurley's radical suburbs, as well as her wonderful essay on Milgram in the places journal called "Housing Is Everyone's Problem." And if you liked this episode, please leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and TeleFriend. Nice Tri's producer is Megan Kanane. Our associate producer is Diana Buds. Our editors are Audrey Dilling and Lisa Pollock, original music and sound design by Greg Pliska. Goutham Shrikishan is our engineer. Our showrunner is Art Chung. Our executive producers are Nishat Kroa and Kelsey Keith. Nice Tri Utopian is a production of Curved and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Avery Truffleman and Utopia's "Do Not Exist." Hi, I'm Neil Abitel, Editor and Chief of the Verge, and Dakota is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web, and how Cloudflare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up. We pulled all that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027 automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when just a few months later in May, the team came to me and said you won't believe it, but automated traffic has now passed human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. If you extrapolate that out five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online. Listen to Dakota, wherever you get your podcast. Support for the show comes from Delta Airlines. Every athlete at the top of her game knows that greatness isn't just a destination. It's a grueling lifelong journey. It's built on early mornings, silent sacrifices, and an unwavering drive to outclimb the achievements of yesterday. That is the journey of a WNBA athlete, and Delta is there every step of the way. Delta is proud to host these competitors, providing charter flights for every WNBA team to elevate their travel experience and champion equity on every leg of their trip. Keep climbing with Delta Airlines, the official airline of the WNBA.