Postwar Suburbia Quotes
They Said It
| "[The Interstate System] will never be finished because America will never be finished." - Francis C. Turner, Federal Highway Administrator, 196935 |
| "If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes." - Underwriting Manual, Federal Housing Administration, 193836 |
| "The Negroes in America are trying to do in sixty years what the Jews in the world have not wholly accomplished in six hundred years. As a Jew I have no room in my mind or heart for racial prejudice. But [...] I have come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then ninety to ninety-five percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. That is their attitude, not ours. [...] As a company our position is simply this: We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem, but we cannot combine the two." - William Levitt, developer of Levittown37 |
| "No one who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do." - William Levitt, developer of Levittown, 194838 |
| "This new highway program will affect our entire economic and social structure. The appearance of the new arteries and their adjacent areas will leave a permanent imprint on our communities and people. They will constitute the framework within which we must live." - Robert Moses, influential urban planner, 195639 |
| "Together, the united forces of our communication and transportation systems are dynamic elements in the very name we bear—United States. Without them, we would be a mere alliance of many separate parts." - President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 195540 |