James Rouse

James Wilson Rouse (April 26, 1914 - April 9, 1996), founder of The Rouse Company, was a pioneering American real estate developer, civic activist, and later, free enterprise-based philanthropist. He is the maternal grandfather of actor Edward Norton.

Youth, education, early career

He was born in Easton, Maryland. He attended college and law school during the Great Depression; after graduating in 1937 he worked for the Federal Housing Administration and in 1939 he was a partner with Hunter Moss at a mortgage banking firm called the Moss-Rouse Company, which would eventually become the Rouse Company.

After World War II he became involved in Baltimore, Maryland's efforts to rehabilitate its decayed housing stock. This led to his participation in Dwight D. Eisenhower's National Housing Task Force starting in 1953. He introduced (or at least helped popularize) the term "urban renewal" to describe the series of recommendations made by that task force.

Shopping malls

In 1958, Rouse built Harundale Mall in Glen Burnie, Maryland, the first enclosed shopping center east of the Mississippi River and the first built by a real estate developer. His company used the term "mall" to describe the development, which was an alternative to the more typical strip malls usually built in the suburbs (the "mall" in "strip mall" came into usage later, after the enclosed mall had been popularized by Rouse's company). Although many now attribute the rise of the shopping mall to the decline of the American downtown core, Rouse's focus at the time was on the introduction of malls as a form of town center for the suburbs.

His company became an active developer and manager of shopping center and mall properties, even as he shifted focus to new projects which eventually included planned commmunities and festival marketplaces.

Planned commmunities

In the 1960s Rouse turned his focus to planned communities. After engaging in a planning exercise for the Pocatinco Hills estate of the Rockefellers, Rouse's first planned residential development to get constructed was the Village of Cross Keys in Baltimore. On June 16, 1961, Rouse bought 68 acres inside the city from the Baltimore Country Club for $25,000 an acre. Rouse excitedly proclaimed that this undertaking “will be the largest, and potentially most important development in the history of Baltimore.” Rouse hoped that he could bring to the residential field “some of the fresh thinking, good taste and high standards which we believe have marked our shopping center developments.”

Familiar with bad housing in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., Rouse now had an opportunity to demonstrate what housing within a city’s borders could be like. “There is a real need for residential development,” he said, “in which there is a strong sense of community; a need to feed into the city some of the atmosphere and pace of the small town and village; a need to create a community which can meet as many as possible of the needs of the people who live there; which can bring these people into natural contact with one another; which can produce out of these relationships a spirit and feeling of neighborliness and a rich sense of belonging to a community.” In a city that practiced strict racial segregation, Rouse intended Cross Keys to be open to all who could afford to live there. The development was a mixture of townhouses, garden apartments, a high-rise apartment house designed by Frank Gehry, stores grouped around a village square, and an office complex. By 1970, the Village of Cross Keys had become among the most desirable places to live in the Baltimore area.

While Cross Keys was still under construction, Rouse decided to build a whole new "city." The creation of Columbia, Maryland, between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., was the greatest adventure of Rouse’s life. Columbia was the ultimate opportunity: the chance to embody his ideals in a whole new city. For the undertaking that would become Columbia, Rouse turned to his partner in previous projects, the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company ("CG"). At a meeting at company headquarters in Hartford, Rouse made his pitch to CG’s top real estate and mortgage people and the company’s chairman of the board, Frazar B. Wilde. The questioning was mostly negative, until Wilde joined in. He expressed the view that CG couldn’t lose. If Rouse’s project did not succeed, the land could always be sold, and probably for a higher price than what it cost.

The land for the new city would be owned by a subsidiary called Howard Research and Development Corporation. CG would own half of that corporation and Rouse’s corporation the other half. Rouse would be responsible for the management of the acquired land and for preparing a master plan for development. CG also put up some of the money for Columbia’s infrastructure. The rest was supplied by Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association and the Chase Manhattan Bank.

By the end of the summer of 1963 close to convert|14000|acre|km2 of Howard County farmland had been acquired, and the time was at hand to begin planning what to do with it. Rouse wanted to hear from a wide assortment of experts and scholars. He brought together an assemblage which became known as "the Work Group." It consisted of top people in health, family life, education, recreation, government, transportation, and employment. Ultimately emerging was the idea that the new city should be a real multi-faceted city, not a bedroom suburb. It should be possible for its residents to find everything they needed right there—jobs, education, recreation, health care, and any other necessity.

What would be the component parts of this city? How should it be divided? What was the ideal size for the core component that would provide most of the essentials for the optimal growth of human beings? Rouse was not reluctant to bring up his home town of Easton as the kind of place that provided the best nourishment of the human spirit. Consensus formed around the idea that the basic subdivision within the new city should be the village, a unit of from 10,000-15,000 people. This number was thought to be the most likely to foster a local feeling of identification: for merchants to get to know their customers, ministers their memberships, and teachers their pupils and parents.

Within the city, there would be 12 villages. Each village would have a central gaterhing place where people of different income levels and types of housing would cross paths and mix. Each village would have a middle school and a high school, a teen center, a supermarket, a library, a hospital, an auditorium, offices, restaurants, some specialty shops, and a few larger recreational facilities. It also would have a multi-denominational house of worship known as an "interfaith center." The hope was that ‘’one’’ building would be used by several religions.

In addition to the villages there would be a core area that would function as the new city’s “downtown.” In it would be the central office of the city’s governing body, the Columbia Association. Here would be the main cluster of retail stores (arranged as a mall), a hotel and conference center, a hospital, movie theaters and a concert hall, a community college, and branches of the Maryland Institute of Art and the Peabody Conservatory of Music.

The main entertainment area was to be known as Tivoli, after the entertainment area in Copenhagen. Early on, Rouse said that he hoped Tivoli would be a place “where, under the benign influence of having fun and relaxing in familiar ways, people would have opportunities, especially attractively and conveniently presented, for discovering new ways to enjoy their free time—new foods, new visual and tactile aesthetic experiences, even new social relations.” Rouse wanted the town center in Columbia to provide the most comprehensive range of recreational activities and services that had ever been contemplated in a new town.

Festival marketplaces

Starting in the mid-1970s and continuing into the 1980s Rouse shifted focus to what he ended up calling the "festival marketplace", of which the Faneuil Hall Marketplace was the first and most successful example. Completed in 1976, the Faneuil Hall Marketplace (comprising Quincy Market and other spaces adjacent to Boston's Faneuil Hall) was designed by architect Benjamin C. Thompson and was a financial success, an act of historic preservation, and an anchor for urban revitalization. However, at its inception, it was considered a highly risky venture, and many critics felt it was doomed to fail. Rouse's innovative business vision looked obvious in retrospect, but it was a bold, contrarian move with few supporters at the outset.

Other examples of Rouse Company "festival marketplace" developments include South Street Seaport in New York City, Market East in Philadelphia, Harborplace in Baltimore, St. Louis Union Station in St. Louis, Downtown Portland's Pioneer Place [http://www.icsc.org/srch/sct/current/sct9901/09.htm] , and the Riverwalk Marketplace of New Orleans. The early festival marketplaces like Faneuil Hall and Harborplace led "TIME" magazine to dub Rouse "the man who made cities fun again."

After 40 years at the Rouse Company, James Rouse retired from day-to-day management in 1979. Soon afterwards, he and his wife founded the Enterprise Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation funded in part by a for-profit subsidiary, The Enterprise Development Company, and focused on seeding partnerships with community groups that would address the need for affordable housing and associated social services for poor neighborhoods.

The Rouse Theatre in Wilde Lake High School is named after James. In May 2006, an approximately four-mile stretch of Maryland Route 175 between Interstate 95 and U.S. Route 29 in Columbia, Maryland, was named after Rouse and his wife, Patty.

James Rouse received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995.

External links

* [http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/remember/rouse_4-10.html Remembering James Rouse] from the website of "The NewsHour"
* [http://www.nbm.org/blueprints/80s/spring88/cover/cover.htm Spring 1988 cover story on Rouse] from "Blueprints" magazine
* [http://www.rff.org/rff_press/bookdetail.cfm?outputID=9413 "Wye Island" by Boyd Gibbons] is a book about a development that James Rouse planned but never built on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
* [http://www.uli.org/AM/Template.cfmSection=Bookstore&Template=Ecommerce/ProductDisplay.cfm&Productid=874 Better Places, Better Lives: A Biography of James Rouse] by Joshua Olsen is the authoritative biography of James Rouse.
* [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4190121 National Public Radio interviewed Joshua Olsen about his book] .
* [http://www.amazon.com/dp/081420953X Merchant of Illusion: James Rouse, America's Salesman of the Businessman's Utopia] is a more critical and academic treatment of Rouse's life.
* [http://bookshop.blackwell.com/jsp/id/Jim_Rouse__capitalistidealist/9780761839446 Jim Rouse: Capitalist/Idealist by Paul Marx] describes the high and low points of Rouse's life and career