Rouse was a pioneering American real estate developer, urban planner, civic activist, and later, free enterprise-based philanthropist.
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.
[6] 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.
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.
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.
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.
He introduced (or at least helped popularize) the term "urban renewal" to describe the series of recommendations made by that task force.
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.
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.
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."
"[16] In a city that practiced strict racial segregation, Rouse intended Cross Keys to be open to all who could afford to live there.
For the undertaking that would become Columbia, Rouse turned to his partner in previous projects, the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company ("CG").
By the end of the summer of 1963 close to 14,000 acres (57 km2) of Howard County farmland had been acquired, and the time was at hand to begin planning what to do with it.
This number was thought to be the most likely to foster a local feeling of identification: for merchants to get to know their customers, ministers their memberships, and teachers their pupils and parents.
Each village would have a central gathering place where people of different income levels and types of housing would cross paths and mix.
It also would have a multi-denominational house of worship known as an "interfaith center" based on the Gordon Cosby's Ecumenical Church of the Savior called the Kittamaqundi Community.
The recession of the 1970s hit Columbia hard, and CG had to refinance the project, reducing The Rouse Company's stake.
Completed in 1976, and partly funded with assistance from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Faneuil Hall Marketplace (comprising Quincy Market and other spaces adjacent to Boston's Faneuil Hall) was designed by architect Benjamin C. Thompson and was a financial success, an act of historic preservation, and an anchor for urban revitalization.
[19] Other examples of Rouse Company "festival marketplace" developments include South Street Seaport in New York City, The Gallery at Market East, in Philadelphia, Harborplace in Baltimore, St. Louis Union Station in St. Louis, Downtown Portland's Pioneer Place, and the Riverwalk Marketplace of New Orleans.
The early festival marketplaces like Faneuil Hall and Harborplace led TIME magazine to dub Rouse "the man who made cities fun again."
Soon afterwards, he and his wife founded the Enterprise Community Partners, a not-for-profit foundation funded in part by a for-profit subsidiary, The Enterprise Development Company, and focused on seeding partnerships with community groups that would address the need for affordable housing and associated social services for poor neighborhoods.
Later, Norton directed the film Motherless Brooklyn, released in 2019, "as an homage to the things [James Rouse] cared about".
[30] In particular, the movie denounces the controversial urbanist Robert Moses, accused of lust for power, questionable ethics, vindictiveness, and racism.