Levittown people: Louise Cassano

I thought it was wonderful moving here. It was a great change for us. It was still the country. We felt free. For me it was great. I had many friends and we had sleepovers in the backyard -- there was no fear of anything. There were no fences so we would just run from one backyard to another. We were always in the street playing.

So we started looking around and looking into that. We found the house that we live in now. We needed $3,000 to buy it and that was a lot of money then. I had saved $2,000, and we borrowed $1,000 from my husband’s aunt. We paid off the loan immediately from our wedding gifts. We sent her a check while we were on our honeymoon. We’ve been here ever since.

Now it’s big boxes in town. A lot of national chains. The environment has remarkably stayed the same. People are still involved in the community, still show an interest in the schools -- although the schools have changed. When I was going to school, there were 25,000 students being educated in Levittown. Now it’s much less. And the schools have changed a lot. They kept building new schools as the population changed.

When we bought this house it had four rooms. As my children grew up, we extended our house. As my extended family grew, we pushed out the rooms. As of a couple years ago, we were still expanding.

People stayed here because of these houses. The houses are very expandable. They were built basically as boxes so you could expand in any direction. And the houses were very affordable.

What challenges does Levittown face now?
The biggest challenge we are facing now is the business environment. That has become a key point. There are a lot of vacant businesses but the Chamber of Commerce is undertaking a project to figure out why that’s happened and what we can do.

Taxes are also very high. Our school taxes are three times our town taxes. We have a wonderful education system. I got an education here that prepared me for anything. But the money it costs to run the system is an enormous [burden]. One of the reasons that it’s so hard is that there aren’t enough businesses to bear it. It’s the reason families leave, the reason seniors leave. It’s expensive and there is not ample senior housing.
I think that’s something Levittown has to consider -- a more modernistic approach in terms of building development in the community. We need affordable housing for our youth and our seniors.