James Wilson Rouse (April 26, 1914 – April 9, 1996), born Wilson Richardson Rouse, was an American businessman and founder of The Rouse Company. Rouse was a pioneering American real estate developer, urban planner, civic activist, and later, free enterprise-based philanthropist. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award, for his lifetime achievements.
James "Jim" Rouse (legally born Wilson Richardson Rouse, but called "Jim" from birth) was born in Easton, Maryland, to Lydia Agnes (née Robinson) and Willard Goldsmith Rouse, a canned-foods broker. Rouse would describe his father as "the most brilliant man I have ever known," and his mother as "a very lovely, warm woman, very much a leader in the community, very loved by everyone."
Willard Rouse, a lawyer trained at Johns Hopkins University, and veteran of the Spanish-American War, once ran for state's attorney for Harford County. When he lost, the Rouse family moved from Bel Air, Maryland, to Easton. Rouse grew up in Easton (which at the time had a population of 5,000) on a well-to-do street on the edge of town. At the time, Talbot County was a place marked by racial inequality and "Lost Cause" Confederate sympathy, and was struggling to adapt from its historic agrarian roots.
Rouse was taught at home by his mother until second grade when he transferred to a public school. In 1930, Rouse's father died of bladder cancer and his mother of heart failure. His childhood home was foreclosed upon. After public high school, where he received mediocre grades, his brother Bill paid for him to attend the private preparatory Tome School in Port Deposit, Maryland, for a year.
Facing money problems and unable to continue at the Tome School, the Rouse family sought a way for him to attend college by appealing to his oldest sister, who had married a United States Navy officer stationed in Hawaii. Rouse declared himself his sister's dependent and, with Navy connections now secured, was thereby able to attend the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa at a greatly reduced cost. Rouse later attended the University of Virginia. He declared his major as political science and waited tables at a local boarding house. Because he was unable to cover the gap between his scholarship and his remaining expenses, he left Charlottesville and moved to Baltimore to try to make it on his own.
He found a job parking cars at the St. Paul Garage for one year. He later remarked that he got the job even though he could not drive, and had convinced his foreman to teach him rather than fire him. In May 1935, Rouse wrote Millard Tydings, who found him a position with the Federal Housing Administration as a clerk specializing in completing FHA loans to eastern Maryland banks. Although he had only two years of undergraduate college on his transcript, in the 1930s that was enough to qualify for law school. He borrowed money in March 1936 from Guy Hollyday who was a loan officer with the Title Guarantee and Trust Company seeking FHA loan guarantees and attended classes three nights a week at the University of Maryland School of Law. He was hired at age 22 by his mentor Hollyday.
While working at the FHA during the New Deal, Rouse was tasked with enforcing racially discriminatory guidelines. Rouse used antisemitic quotas when building in the Roland Park neighborhood of Baltimore. In 1951, Rouse enforced a quota of no more than 12% Jewish residents for the Maryland Apartment in north Baltimore until 75% of the apartments were rented.
Rouse graduated in 1937 and in 1939 left the FHA and became partner with Hunter Moss at a mortgage banking firm called the Moss-Rouse Company funded by a $20,000 loan from Moss's sister, which would eventually become the Rouse Company. The company would specialize in FHA backed loans, and hired Churchill G. Carey from Connecticut General, with his former company providing loan capital to Moss-Rouse. Both Moss and Rouse served during WWII, with Moss joining the Marines and Rouse the Navy. Rouse was able to defer duty while his wife was pregnant, shipping out to Hawaii to work on John Henry Towers staff on July 4, 1942. Rouse returned from the war and went back to work with Moss, using his gambling assets. By 1951, the Moss-Rouse Company had become the largest mortgage banking company in the state of Maryland. In 1954, the two partners split, with Moss summarizing the split this way: "[Rouse] was a person who liked to do things in a big way. I liked the smaller company. So we split up."
As he was growing his business, Rouse pursued various civic activities. He co-founded the Citizens Planning and Housing Association (CPHA) and became involved in Baltimore, Maryland's efforts to rehabilitate its decayed housing stock through The Baltimore Plan. The national publicity of this program 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.
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 communities and festival marketplaces.
In late 1973, the Columbia project took a downturn as Maryland land developers such as Joel Kline, and politicians such as Governor Marvin Mandel, and Vice President Spiro Agnew were indicted on various charges of corruption related to land speculation. Rouse was indicted for donations to Mandel's 1974 campaign which violated campaign contribution limits, but the charges were dropped because they had been brought outside the one-year limit.
Harundale Mall has since been replaced by Harundale Plaza. In 1999, the mall reopened and redeveloped as Harundale Plaza, a strip shopping center. Stores include A.J. Wright, a Super Fresh supermarket, Outback Steakhouse, Hollywood Video, Burlington Coat Factory, and a U.S. Post Office, along with several other typical strip-mall stores. The signature "rock" from Harundale Mall is now at Harundale Plaza.
In the 1960s Rouse turned his focus to planned communities. After engaging in a planning exercise for the Pocantico Hills estate of the Rockefellers, Rouse constructed his first planned residential development: the Village of Cross Keys in Baltimore. On June 16, 1961, Rouse bought 68 acres (280,000 m2) 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.