William Pulte, Pathbreaking Home Builder, Is Dead at 85

William Pulte, Pathbreaking Home Builder, Is Dead at 85
“He was a student of William Levitt and Henry Ford,” said Mr. Pulte’s grandson William Pulte.
By CONOR DOUGHERTYMARCH 9, 2018
William Pulte, who built his first house as a teenager
and went on to found one of the country’s largest home builders, churning out some 600,000 houses and becoming a billionaire, died on Wednesday at his home in Naples, Fla.
His family announced the death.
“Bill Pulte’s energy and dedication to home building helped transform the industry
and helped more than half a million families across the country find a place to call their own,” the philanthropist Eli Broad, a founder of the Los Angeles-based KB Home and one of Mr. Pulte’s home-building contemporaries, said by email.
Mr. Pulte was part of a new generation of home builders who got their start when a
postwar nation was building miles of new freeways and rings of expanding suburbs.
“It only took one house to figure out that I was going to let other people do the building
and I was going to do the thinking,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1990.
“He started out building one home, then two homes, then three homes.