Postwar Suburbia Quotes

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