Americans dream of owning a single-family home—ideally in some leafy Arcadia not too far from the city workplace.

There are many shapes to this dream—Gothic cottages and mini-castles surrounded by manicured wilderness, like the first planned suburban development in Llewellyn Park, N.J.; detached dwellings in sylvan surroundings, with restrictive land use and minimum cost regulations (Olmstead and Vauz' Riverside); the company town, whose prototype is Pullman, IL.; a suburb like Forest Hills successfully inserted into the very heart of New York: a totally designed community that combines quaintness and modernity, compact enought to be served by a single school and having a civic focus; Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard, which grew from a religious tent city into a planned resort village.

Levittown addressed the problem of affordable individual housing for large masses and their automobiles. Some of the solutions became problems in themselves. Still, though in places it turned nightmare—Slurbia, spreading like ooze between and even within cities—the dream of owning one's own home is the glory of American life, the most persuasive exemplar of our democracy. (58 minutes)