Better Places, Better Lives: A Biography of James Rouse

Journal of Southern History, August, 2005 by Carl Abbott

Better Places, Better Lives: A Biography of James Rouse. By Joshua Olsen. (Washington, D.C.: ULI-the Urban Land Institute, c. 2003. Pp. xii, 442. $34.95, ISBN 0-87420-919-6.)

James Rouse was one of the most important actors in the shaping of American cities in the second half of the twentieth century. Born in 1914 and raised in Easton, Maryland, he experienced a wider world at the University of Hawaii before setting up business in Baltimore as a mortgage banker who acted as middleman between home buyers and institutional lenders. That city remained his base of operations as he became increasingly prominent as a civic leader and moved into direct real estate development, first in the Baltimore area and then on the national scene.

Rouse made his first big money as a developer of suburban shopping centers, most notably the Cherry Hill Mall in New Jersey. In the 1960s he undertook to build the planned community of Columbia, Maryland, one of the most ambitious and successful of the so-called new towns. In the 1970s he pioneered the idea of the festival marketplace with Faneuil Hall in Boston and Harborplace in Baltimore. In the 1980s he created the Enterprise Foundation to devise ways to build affordable housing and establish stable communities in distressed urban areas. In each of these efforts, he was a pioneer and tireless advocate, convincing cautious banks, insurance companies, and pension funds to back untried concepts. The peak of his influence came in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he had the ear of many officials in the Carter administration and appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the banner "Cities Are Fun!" He continued to work on national housing policy, demonstration housing, and anti-poverty programs in Baltimore until his death in 1996.

Joshua Olsen carefully tells this story in a straightforward biography written from the inside. Olsen utilized several dozen interviews with Rouse's associates and professional colleagues, a partially completed Rouse autobiography, the very extensive holdings of Rouse's personal and business papers at the Columbia (Maryland) Archives, and papers of several other corporations and professional groups. The book walks us through Rouse's increasingly innovative business deals and his evolving ideas about American cities, with enough attention to his personal life to put the development of his career in context. Again and again the story reminds us that real estate development is a precarious entrepreneurial venture that requires the precise coordination of investors, architects, engineers, developers, and politicians. It depends on accurately timing the market and operates on a narrow margin between success and failure. Rouse's energy and optimism were essential to his many successes but also drew him into not infrequent failures.

Olsen admires Rouse, and readers will too. Rouse never questioned the capitalist structure of the land market, but he drew on a deep Christian belief that engaged action could help to build just communities where people could realize their personal and social potential. Rouse was an evangelist rather than a deep thinker. He gave hundreds of speeches and wrote scores of articles for trade journals and popular media, striking variations on a few arguments: that cities can be exciting and engaging, that developers and citizen activists have common ground, and that well-built places can facilitate better lives. These, by no coincidence, are also the underlying values of the book's publisher, the Urban Land Institute, the national think-tank for the progressive wing of the public and private development industry. Readers interested in Rouse's work should also consult Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Merchant of Illusion: James Rouse, America's Salesman of the Businessman's Utopia (Columbus, Ohio, 2004), a thematically organized study whose title shows its more skeptical take and broader context. Both for an introduction to Rouse's work and for a sense of the challenges and rewards of urban real estate development, however, Better Places, Better Lives: A Biography of James Rouse is a solid starting point.

Portland State University

CARL ABBOTT