Rouse, James W.

James W. Rouse (1914–1996) is known as a visionary developer and a master planner. Rouse died at the age of 81 after having a full life as a lawyer, developer, and [Page 689]civic activist, and later a philanthropist as well. Rouse was a driving force behind major trends in American urban development in the second half of the 20th century. He developed Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace and Baltimore's Harborplace and directed the planning and construction of the new town of Columbia, Maryland, among many other projects.

Rouse was born in Easton, Maryland, and graduated with a bachelor of law degree in 1937. Rouse worked for the Federal Housing Administration and was a partner in the thriving mortgage firm Moss-Rouse Company, which would years later become the Rouse Company. He worked in the rehabilitation of Baltimore's slums during the urban renewal era. In the 1950s, Rouse pioneered the emergence of the enclosed shopping mall when he built the Harundale Mall in Glen Burnie, Maryland, the first enclosed shopping mall on the East Coast. In the 1960s, Rouse started building master-planned communities. Disappointed with the sterility of the suburbs, he used the colonial village model to build his planned community of Columbia, Maryland. Columbia was designed not only with many new amenities not found in subdivisions of that time, but also to help eliminate racial, religious, and income segregations. Columbia's master plan had 10 self-contained villages, around which day-to-day activities would happen. This master-planned community opened in 1967.

In the 1970s, Rouse sparked a wave of downtown revitalization in many cities by creating the festival marketplace concept. The first of these real estate developments was the Faneuil Hall Marketplace, which opened in 1976. South Street Seaport in New York City, Harborplace in Baltimore, downtown Portland's Pioneer Place, and the Riverwalk in New Orleans soon followed it. After retirement in 1979, Rouse created the Enterprise Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to housing America's poor. Rouse understood that although cities each face unique problems, they all exemplify the vitality and creativity of the human endeavor. Rouse was a man of convictions and actions; he cared about affordable housing and commercial revitalization as ways to strengthen American cities. Rouse's legacy touched the human landscape of America in a way that not too many people did. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995.