"We believe that every family in the United States is entitled to decent shelter."

These are not the words of Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity, instead they are the words of William J. Levitt, one of Time magazine's 100 Most Important People of the Century. Beginning after World War II, he and his company are recognized for revolutionizing the home-building industry and building more than 140,000 houses worldwide.

After WWII, the U.S. government recognized a need for 5,000,000 houses and incentivized private industry to provide this housing by securing loans made to builders and to buyers. Five years after the war, 4,000,000 houses had been produced. William J. Levitt's company had produced over 30,000 of them.

In the tradition of Henry Ford, Mr. Levitt applied modern principles to the manufacture. He developed a stationary assembly line where the workers would move but the product remained fixed. He decomposed the construction into 26 (or 27) steps and then allocated teams of two or three to perform their unique step on each house (raising studs, red paint painters, white paint painters, deckers, sheathers, washing machine bolt tighteners, etc.). All of the material used on the site was cut to length, labeled, sorted and delivered to each slab (yes, they used concrete slabs and would trench each house in less than fifteen minutes) in identical kits. He purchased his own timberland and sawmill. He manufactured his own nails. At the height of their production they could produce 36 houses/day.

The cookie-cutter housing concept was not without its critics and controversy (would William Safire be proud?) He was himself Jewish, but would not sell to African-Americans. His argument being that while he had no room for racial intolerance, the prevalent attitude was that the large majority of his customers would not favor integration. He once said, "As a Jew, I have no room in my mind or heart for racial prejudice, but, by various means, I have come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 to 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. That is their attitude, not ours." Always a capitalist, I believe he described it a little more palatably as, "We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem but we can't combine the two." I believe that Time recognizes him not only for revolutionizing U.S. construction practices, but for leading the suburbanization of America.

Does any of this sound familiar? Racial parallels aside, we've been building 10 houses since May. Once again, I'm going to write that "we're almost done", and we are. We expect to be ready for two more homeowners to move in on Friday, and hopefully a couple more the following week. But, as Christiaan pointed out in the Fortune magazine article that introduced us to William J. Levitt, he was able to complete a house every fifteen minutes and because of the amount of preparation, they only required 20% of their labor to be skilled. I believe the "15 minutes" may be a deceptive statistic, but I do believe that they understood volume and this assembly-line technique has merit.

Anyway, their houses were 750 square feet, one level, two bedrooms with an attic. Our houses are 1150 square feet, one level, three bedroom houses with an attic. I hope that we could at least keep up with practices from 50 years ago.

(Thanks to Google, I was able to do a good amount of research while another Project Runway marathon was on Bravo. Most of this information was gathered from The Capital Century, Wikipedia, and Time.)