Rouse, James Wilson

(b. 26 April 1914 in Easton, Maryland; d. 9 April 1996 in Columbia, Maryland), real-estate developer who worked on regional shopping centers, suburban communities, urban festival markets, and inner-city restoration efforts.

Rouse was the youngest of five children of Willard G. Rouse, a canned-foods broker, and Lydia Robinson, a homemaker. Although his father owned a prosperous business, Rouse was encouraged to rise early and tend his own garden, selling the vegetables to local grocers. He also worked as a golf caddie, factory worker, and Fuller Brush salesman. He attended Easton High School, where he was president of his student council and the school newspaper, and finished his studies at the Tome School in Fort Deposit, Maryland, in 1930.

Rouse’s parents both died while he was in high school, and he lost the family house when the bank foreclosed on the mortgage. He studied briefly at the University of Hawaii and then at the University of Virginia, but financial difficulties forced him to leave college in 1933 and work as a garage attendant in Baltimore. He began studying law during night classes at the University of Maryland and worked as a law clerk with the Federal Housing Administration.

In 1936 Rouse went to work at the Title Guarantee and Trust Company of Baltimore as head of its new mortgage department. After receiving his law degree in 1937, he joined the real-estate appraiser Hunter Moss in opening a mortgage banking business, the Moss-Rouse Company, specializing in FHA-approved loans for one-family homes.

On 3 May 1941 Rouse married Elizabeth J. Winstead. They had three children and were divorced in 1972. Rouse subsequently married Patricia Traugott Rixey, a former housing commissioner of Norfolk, Virginia, in 1974.

Rouse joined the Naval Reserve as a lieutenant in 1942 and was assigned to the Naval Air Intelligence staff of the Commander of the Air Force Pacific Fleet. He was discharged in 1945 with the rank of lieutenant commander. Rouse then returned to Baltimore and expanded his business operations to include the underwriting of apartment houses and shopping centers. In 1954 he bought out his partner and renamed the firm James W. Rouse and Company.

During the postwar years Rouse was also active as a government adviser. He served as chair of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Housing in Baltimore from 1949 to 1952 and as subcommittee chair of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Advisory Committee on Government Housing Policies and Programs in 1953. His work led to the drafting of the 1954 Federal Housing Act, and he purportedly coined the phrase “urban renewal.” In 1955 he and Nathaniel Keith coauthored No Slums in Ten Years, which called for an ambitious (and unfulfilled) government program to redevelop Washington, D.C., using the new federal law. Rouse also was a founder of the Greater Baltimore Committee and worked on the Maryland State Commission, which drafted legislation setting up a regional planning agency for Baltimore and its suburbs.

Meanwhile, Rouse led his company into planning and constructing regional shopping centers in the new suburbs. His first large shopping mall was Harundale, built in 1958 on the outskirts of Baltimore, followed by the Cherry Hill Mall in New Jersey in 1961. By the end of the decade, he had developed more than a dozen malls.

In the mid-1960s, in response to criticism that suburban “sprawl” was architecturally monotonous as well as segregated by race and social class, Rouse turned his attention to the design and construction of large-scale suburban planned communities. Purchasing 14,000 acres in rural Howard County between Baltimore and Washington, he built the community of Columbia, which contained seven suburban “villages”—clusters of single-family houses and garden apartments—set within a system of roads, schools, and other public facilities. The first homes went on sale in 1967, and Rouse specified that 20 percent were to be sold to African Americans. It eventually housed 56,000 residents. Although the “new city” of Columbia gained much attention and praise as an antidote to unplanned and segregated suburban sprawl, it was only a mild financial success. It had to be refinanced during the 1974–1975 recession, and Rouse later canceled plans for similar developments in Shelby Farms, Tennessee, and Wye Island, Maryland.

At the same time, Rouse recognized that the postwar migration to the suburbs had “sucked the blood out of the central cities and left some of the urban basket cases we see today.” Seeking a way to redevelop abandoned commercial centers, he and the architect Benjamin Thompson created the concept of a “festival marketplace,” a unified area of new shops, restaurants, and restored historic buildings that would attract suburbanites and tourists. The first festival market was in Boston. Based upon a renovated Faneuil Hall and adjacent Quincy Market (opened August 1976) it received critical praise and was an immediate financial success. It was followed by the Gallery in Philadelphia (opened August 1977) and Harborplace at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor (opened July 1980). New York City mayor Edward Koch then asked Rouse to develop the South Street Seaport complex (opened 1983). The Rouse Company later developed plans for similar efforts in San Francisco, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and other cities. Rouse specified that a minimum proportion of the businesses would be run by African American and inner-city residents. The festival marketplace concept succeeded in the nation’s largest cities but failed in smaller ones, such as Richmond, Virginia, and Toledo, Ohio, leading one analyst to note that “street jugglers and candle shops cannot solve every city’s economic woes.”

In 1979 Rouse resigned as chief executive officer of the Rouse Company but continued as part-time chairman of the board until 1981. Thereafter he concentrated his energies upon his newly created Enterprise Foundation, which focused on the redevelopment of inner-city neighborhoods. Initially the foundation emphasized replacing and upgrading the urban housing stock, but it later shifted its attention to social aspects of urban life such as education, employment training, medical help, and anticrime programs. Rouse also worked with Jubilee Housing, Inc., which encouraged housing rehabilitation in Washington, D.C., and with the Urban Wildlife Research Center.

On 29 September 1995, President Bill Clinton awarded Rouse the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his efforts to “heal the torn-out heart” of America’s cities. During his final year Rouse underwent chemotherapy for lymphoma; he died as a result of complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. His handwritten instructions for his memorial service said that funerals should be joyous events, since he believed that “I have just left on my trip to my next life.” He is buried at Columbia Memorial Park.

Rouse pioneered several concepts that altered the face of urban and suburban America: regional shopping centers, planned communities, and festival marketplaces. Although regional shopping centers continue to dominate the suburban landscape, planned communities proved to have large capital requirements and relatively low profit margins. Festival marketplaces showed uneven results, with the greatest success in large cities with preexisting tourist draws. His influence is evident in hundreds of cities and towns across the United States.

Rouse’s papers are at the Columbia Archives, Columbia, Maryland. His life and work are discussed in Gurney Breckenfeld, Columbia and the New Cities (1971). Ellen Uzelac, “The Chosen,” Baltimore Magazine (May 1997) focuses upon Rouse’s legacy for the Enterprise Foundation. See also J. W. Anderson, “A Brand New City for Maryland,” Harper’s (Nov. 1964); Gurney Breckenfeld, “Jim Rouse Shows How to Give Downtown Retailing New Life,” Fortune (10 April 1978); “Shopping Centers Downtown: Roundtable on Rouse,” Progressive Architecture (July 1981); Robert K. Landers, “The Conscience of James Rouse,” Historic Preservation(Dec. 1985); “Jim Rouse, A Life Well Lived,”Network News (June 1996); John Bancroft, “A Visionary Lender-Developer,” Real Estate Finance Today (23 Dec. 1996); and Jon Goss, “Disquiet on the Waterfront: Reflections on Nostalgia and Utopia in the Urban Archetypes of Festival Marketplaces,” Urban Geography 17 (1996). Obituaries are in the New York Times (17 Apr. 1996), Washington Post (17 Apr. 1996), and Time (22 Apr. 1996).

Stephen G. Marshall