Sometimes I’m afraid to say this out loud for fear of jinxing it, but we live in an area of the country that is a sweet spot when it comes to severe weather and geological events. To be clear, we’ve had brushes with hurricanes, tropical storms, and Nor’easters and flooding does occur along the Delaware River and the Neshaminy Creek, but in large measure, Levittown has weathered through.

In the 1950s some criticized the slab-on-grade, wood-frame sameness of Levittown as well as the assembly line methods used to build these houses. The iconic ‘Levittowner’ (ranch style) model shown below has long served as an exemplar for Levittown. Many of us who live here have come to appreciate this collection of houses as communities where the sameness that once characterized Levittown became the canvas we used to express our individual tastes over the years. Remodeling seems to be our favorite pastime. Levittown is now a vintage community with some of the earliest construction approaching 70 years of age. How will this collection of communities fare as we move into the future of a changed climate?

As an inland state, Pennsylvania will not face the same challenges as coastal states. However, in addition to higher temperature conditions, we are expected to experience higher average annual rainfall brought by storms of higher intensity; localized flooding and wind damage are reasonable expectations. Climate change is underway but conditions are still changing and carbon dioxide concentrations continue to rise; the endpoint is not yet in sight.

When Levittown was constructed in the 1950s, it was considered a civil engineering marvel with mile upon mile of in-ground piping, roadways, power lines, and related infrastructure that was constructed to the standards of the time. Some of this infrastructure has been updated, particularly if it is above-ground, but below-ground infrastructure is costly and disruptive to update and is likely only to be updated when it fails to meet the needs of the day. A 100-year storm that served as the basis of design in the 1950s is not the same 100-year storm of today. The capacity of existing networks of storm drains will be an issue for our local governments as time goes on.

As we move forward, how can we, as individual homeowners, contribute to blunt the effects of the changing climate? A massive amount of energy is used in the 17,311 homes that Levitt built which translates into a massive amount of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere. (See the report that can be downloaded from the Levittown Resources tab.) Even so, some of our houses have been successfully updated to become not only energy efficient, but more comfortable too. Few of us are in a position to make the changes to our homes all at once, but we can make a plan and each time we take on a remodeling project at home, work the plan. In time, it adds up.

There is a lot of information available about how to upgrade housing with energy efficiency as a priority. The Department of Energy has a lot of useful information as you might expect. The enclosed link focuses on DIY things we can tackle. This is only the tip of iceberg of available information.   (https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/do-it-yourself-energy-savings-projects)

One of the best sources of information will be from fellow homeowners who have already gone down this road.  Their experience may be directly relevant to the house model you or I live in. Remember, Levitt only built six basic house models here, but he built a heck of a lot of them.

Figure 1: Levittowner, Type B, Front View

Kevin Deeny