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Comment by pauldenton | Hacker News Reader

At the peak of construction, Levitt was building one house every 16 minutes. Each house cost around $8,000, a price that was reduced to about $400 with GI bill benefits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown Soldiers coming back after WW2 could get a house for 400$. And it had 2 bathrooms

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Not all soldiers:

    African American GIs, who served with honor in World War II, could work on Levittown construction crews but could not join the hordes of people pressing into Levittown rental and sales offices.

This was very much the root of one of the great economic divisons in modern US times .. the post WWII boom and generational multiplying effects were segregated.

https://www.nypl.org/events/exhibitions/galleries/installati...

Those homes are half a million today per zillow. Much better appreciation than the Altadena homes, 7 fold thereabouts.

My grandfather was a WWII, Korea, and Vietnam vet with the GI Bill. In 1968, there was no housing discount, only low interest loans. Their house cost $10k then and sold for $2.1m in 2018. I have the original copies of the deeds and of their loan.

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