James W Rouse

Visionary developer who built new towns in the countryside, shopping malls in the suburbs and "festival marketplaces," like Faneuil Hall in Boston, in older downtowns, and later used the profits from these ventures to help generate housing for the poor. Columbia, a new town Mr. Rouse created in the late 1960's on 14,000 acres of farmland outside Baltimore, was intended as an ordered response to chaotic postwar sprawl and as an integrated, self-contained community. Organized around nine small "villages," each with several hundred houses and its own small shopping area, by 1981 Columbia had 56,000 residents, roughly 20 percent of them African-American. his most influential effort was surely the Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, in which a set of 150-year-old abandoned Greek Revival buildings were restored and converted into the first "festival marketplace." Faneuil Hall, designed by Benjamin Thompson, inspired an entire genre of urban malls, including Harborplace in Baltimore, the South Street Seaport in lower Manhattan and Grand Avenue in Milwaukee. Harborplace was widely credited with bringing about the renewal of Baltimore's waterfront, and Faneuil Hall and the South Street Seaport gave tourists the kind of comfortable town square in the center of unfamiliar cities. It was the capstone of his career, the Enterprise Foundation, that Mr. Rouse pointed to with the greatest pride. his wife, Patricia, who joined him in forming the foundation, conceived of the nonprofit Enterprise as not only a source of housing money but as a broad-based advocate for the urban poor. The foundation has worked with several hundred local groups in cities around the country, providing expertise as well as money to assist them in developing affordable housing, and by 1994, it had built than 42,500 housing units. He attended the University of Virginia, but left in 1933 when the Depression required him to work full-time. He earned a law degree at night at the University of Maryland. He was one of the first developers to create an enclosed mall with Harundale, a suburban mall south of Baltimore, completed in 1958. In the 1960's, Mr. Rouse came to operate on several tracks: as a builder of relatively conventional and highly profitable suburban malls, as the visionary builder of Columbia, and as an increasingly prominent urban advocate. In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1974 after his divorce from the former Elizabeth J. Winstead, he is survived by three children, Lydia Robinson Rouse, James W. Rouse Jr. and Winstead Rouse.