James Rouse

James Wilson Rouse (April 26, 1914 – April 9, 1996) 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 was born in Easton, Maryland, to Lydia Agnes (née Robinson) and Willard Goldsmith Rouse, a canned-foods broker.

His father, a lawyer trained at Johns Hopkins University, 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 (then population: 5,000) on a well-to-do street on the edge of town.

He was taught at home by his mother until second grade when he transferred to a public school.

In 1930, Rouse lost his father to bladder cancer, his mother to heart failure, and his childhood home to bank foreclosure.

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.

Although he had only two years of undergraduate college on his transcript, in the 1930s that was enough to qualify for law school.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By 1951, the Moss-Rouse Company had become the largest mortgage banking company in the state of Maryland.

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 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.

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.