TheConscienceofESrcUSE

A abion of decent housing for the poor noar

driaes the'man usho gaue us gJitzy malls and

festiu al marketPlaces.

BY ROBERT K. LANDERS

ow starting the eighth decadeof h is excePt ional l i fe ,developer )ames Wilson Rouse

is a deceptively ordinaryJooking man'

A caricaturist would have to make do

with a lopsided grin, a bald and mottled

head (gray hair still valiantly in posses-

sion of the outskirts), tortoise-shellglasses, tufted eyebrows that resolutelygo their own ways and, PerhaPs, a

silver-and-gold tie pin he wears, a sym-

bol of Columbia, Md.-the trim utopia

he created midway between Baltimoreand Washington. The Pin is a l itt le

figure with arms upraised, gingerbread

humanity reaching out.Simple, yet quite possibly profound,

the image seems a fit one, not only for

Rouse's hopeful vision of mankind but

for Jim Rouse himself , ever striving to

reach out and give mankind an assist.In his benevolent bearing there is no

hint of the imperial. Neither his bus-

iness success nor the great impact he

has had on the American scene has led

him to suppose himself a god. His headis unswelled-but far from emPtY.

"He's a man of ideas," said the late

Morton Hoppenfeld, an architect and

long-time associate. "He's a wizard in

terms of financing and economic ideas,

as well as marketing and merchandis-ing and ideas about quality of l i fe.What he can do with numbers will bog-gle your mind."

Financial wizardtY underwroteRouse's far-sighted ideas. During the

1950s and'60s, he and his developmentfirm, The Rouse ComPanY, helPed togive new meaning to the word mall and

so, in a sense, to suburbia itself . TheirHarundale Mall, which opened in Glen

Hrsronrc PnesenvertoN

Burnie, Md., in 1958, was among thefirst such enclosed Edens in the coun-try. Rouse led-and the malling ofsuburbia followed.

Then, during the 1970s and '80s,

Rouse and company, hot on the demo-graphic trail back to urbia, confoundedthe usual hidebound skeptics and suc-ceeded in giving new allure to severalhistoric port cit ies, in the form ofvibrant "festival marketplaces." FaneuilHall Marketplace in Boston and Har-borplace in Baltimore were immensesuccesses.

Rouse has been praised for imagina-tively preserving history, as well ascrit icized for giving it an unrealisticgloss-Rouse-if ication, the process hasbeen dubbed. The company's SouthStreet Seaport in Manhattan got mixedreviews at its opening two years ago."Something was lost as well as gainedin converting a blue-collar neighbor-hood into a kind of outdoor mall,"wrote Christian Science Monitor ar-chitectural crit ic Jane Holtz Kay.

Stil l , glittery "outdoor malls" arisingin the centers of cit ies once thoughtdoomed represented good news, excit-ing news. And in 198L, Time canonizedRouse in a cover story, call ing him "anurban visionary" with "a unique anduncanny ability to blend commerce andshowmanship into a magnetizing forcein the inner city."

Thus anointed, and retired sinceL979from The Rouse Company, Jim Rouseis now attempting an even more im-pressive feat. He is seeking to makehousing for the poor in America's citiesfit and livable. And to finance his causehe is continuing to dot the urban land-scape with festival marketplaces, albeitsmaller ones, in medium-sized cit iesfrom Norfolk, Va., to Toledo, Ohio.

Rouse's grand crusade began in 1981.He formed the nonprofit EnterpriseFoundation to aid neighborhood hous-ing groups, and, at the same time, hecreated the Enterprise DevelopmentCompany as its for-profit subsidiary.Until the company is in the black,however, the foundation must dependmainly on corporate and individualdonations. By the middle'90s, our fore-cast says that we'l l be able to pour $5mill ion to $10 mill ion a year into thefoundation," Rouse says.

Serving as chairman of the boardand chief executive officer of both is

"If you uanted to doanything about thesekinds of issues, yot)

had to do them-youcouldn't be trying toget somebody else to

do them."

Rouse himself, this avuncular f iguresipping diet Sprite from a Styrofoamcup as he sits at a round table in hismodestly appointed office in Columbiaand ta lks wi th a v is i tor .

Rouse has never pretended to be acorporate manager, according to MortHoppenfeld. "He doesn't engage in thedisciplines of getting things done; hebrings people around him to do that."Yet he is very much involved in the im-portant decisions, wants to know everydetail and, in the words of EnterpriseDevelopment President Aubrey Cor-man, is "relentless in his insistence thatthings be done the right way."

When not in his office, Rouse is oftennot far away, working in the unpreten-tious Columbia home he shares withhis wife, Patty. A former commissionerof the Redevelopment and HousingAuthority of Norfolk, Va., she is in-volved in Enterprise, too. They worktogether at their dining-room table oron their bright porch with its wide viewof man-made Wilde Lake.

About to head for home this even-ing, Rouse, the last to leave, closes upEnterprise Development's offices.Fumbling for the right door key, he tellshis visitor that Enterprisels publicity "is

uay ahead of our performance-wehaven't done that much." Amblingdown the hall and greeting everyone hemeets, he seems an old-fashioned figurefrom mythic America-working hardand l iving happily in some impossiblyvirtuous small-town Arcadia.

Rouse's manner may conjure up thequaint America of Norman Rockwell ,but his great successes, and perhapsmore admirable fai lures, have takenplace in a larger, more complicated andaltogether less satisfactory world-thereal one.

He was born to a f f luence onMaryland's Eastern Shore, the son ofa canned-goods broker and the young-est of six chi ldren. He grew up happilyin the small town of Easton. But in thelate 1.920s, his father lost almosteverything. Then, in 1930, came aseries of hammer blows. His motherdied in February, his father died inAugust and the bank foreclosed ontheir home in October. Rouse, newlygraduated from high school, was 16.

Even then, optimism stirred withinhim. "Of course, I knew we were get-t ing into the Depression, and the wholeeconomy wasn't too good, but I canremember feel ing-and, in a way, feela little embarrassed about feeling-thatthis was real ly good for me, that I wasgoing to have to make i t and that I wasyoun8.

"As the years went on, 1931, '32, '33,

I remember how much luckier I used tofeel than those older men whose l iveswere real ly blown apart. . . . I t was avery, very tough, tough, tough time for,fine people who had thought their liveswere secure. I 've never quite forgottenthat. The Depression hangover is avery substantial one; you never canreal ly feel safe."

Survivor Rouse went to the Univer-sity of Maryland night law school in1933 and got a job parking cars. In1,934he got a better job-legal clerk inthe new Federal Housing Administra-tion's Baltimore office. Two years laterhe persuaded the Tit le Guarantee &Trust Company to let him set up amortgage department; he would f indinsurance companies daring enough tobuy the new and controversial FHAmortgages, and then he would sell themto the insurance companies. In 1939 heand another young man, Hunter Moss,borrowed $20.000 and formed their

DecrvsrR 1985 67

own mortgage-banking firm in Balti-more, The Moss-Rouse Company. Iteventually became Rouse Real EstateFinance and was sold last year to thePaine-Webber Group, Inc. for stockvalued at $50.5 mill ion.

Just as an FHA clerkship had ledRouse to mortgage banking, so mort-gage banking was to lead him todevelopment and his profound concernwith the urban condition.

"l think that if you're in real estatefinance or development," he reflects,"you're automatically drawn into amuch deeper, wider spectrum of urbanlife than a manufacturer or a banker ora merchant, unless he reaches out.That's because what you're doing isfinancing, or developing, the pieces ofa city, and, therefore, the city is yourplaying field."

But before all that could happen,World War II intervened, thrustingRouse into Naval Air Intell igence andservice on the staff of the commanderof the Air Force Pacific Fleet-"a very,very fascinating job with remarkablepeople." They, in turn, found Rousepretty remarkable himself, not least atplaying poker. "During his entire tourof duty in Hawaii," author Boyd Gib-bons writes in Wye Island, "Jim Rousedrew no Navy pay; he lived entirely onhis card winnings."

Some of those "remarkable people"he got to know during-the war, mensuch as investment banker August Bel-mont, were to be extremely helpful toRouse in the 1950s. when he was get-ting into shopping-center development.

That was in the future, however. Thewar over, Rouse returned to Baltimore,mortgage banking-and involvementin urban affairs. During the late 1940s,he appeared before congressional com-mittees in Washington and testif ied onbehal f o f the Mortgage BankersAssociation. Although he was strong-ly in favor of urban redevelopment, heopposed public housing. He argued, ashe remembers. "that the real iob inAmerica-then and now-is to makethe existing housing inventory fit andlivable." Once that "real job" weredone, with government assistance, thenthere would be only a residual need forpublic housing.

Rouse came away from Washingtonsomewhat disillusioned and thinking hemight be able to do more without Con-

62 HlsronrcPltrstnverror'r

gress than with it. "I really foundmyself making a very important deci-sion: If you wanted to do anythingabout these kinds of issues, you had todo them-you couldn't be trying to getsomebody else to do them."

He soon got directly involved in aneffort to improve slum housing inBaltimore, using what he now calls "theprimitive instrument" of vigorous en-forcement of existing laws. "ln a blockwith fewer than 400 people," Rouserecalls, "they kil led 450 rats, took out46 truckloads of debris and required in-stallation of inside toilets." The effortwas then expanded to a 23-block areanear Johns Hopkins University. Theanti-slum effort was only modestly suc-cessful, however, and most of the gains

"ln A block TDith fezuerthan 400 people, theykilled 450 rats, tookout 46 truckloads ofdebris and requiredinstallation of inside

toilets. "

proved transient. Still, the experiencewas valuable to him.

The "gingerbread man" in Rousereached out well beyond Baltimore.Serving as a member of PresidentEisenhower's Advisory Committee onHous ing P rog rams and Po l i c i es(1953-4), Rouse recalls, he had iust readMiles Colean's Renetoing Our Citiesand, working late, came up at three onemorning with the phrase urban reneu.talto describe the aim of a comprehensiveprogram of redevelopment, rehabilita-tion and conservation.

The actual program that followedturned out to be less comprehensivethan Rouse had hoped, but he sti l lmaintains that urban renewal was, onthe whole, a great success. "Americancities are enormously better off as citiesthan they would ever have been with-out i t , " he says.

Although he considers urban re-newal to have been a success, Rouse didtell Life magazine in the mid 1960s,when he was bringing Columbia intobeing: "lf I had all the dollars in theurban-renewal program, I would takethem all and put them on the l ine toproduce one real image of what a citycould be."

Rouse originally hoped that Colum-bia would be so dramatic a success thatit would be widely imitated. That didnot happen. Columbia was a success,but not, in f inancial terms, a stunningsuccess. There have been no imitators.

Columbia was not Rouse's only at-tempt at arranging a dramatic demon-stration of urban potential. Nor has hestopped trying. The Enterprise Founda-tion is hoping to get one city, perhapstwo, to join it in a commitment tomake all the housing in that city fit andlivable within a decade.

It was a spring day, a decade ago, andRosa Smith could scarcely believe herears. A white woman, Barbara Moore,was actually inviting her to lunch in herhome. Smith went, expecting to eatfrom a paper plate "so that it could bethrown out afterwards. But it was en-tirely different . . . . It was just sowonderful, so nice."

Certainly, nothing like that had everhappened back in Rocky Mount, N.C.,whe re Smi th , a sha rec roppe r ' sdaughter, had grown up. She had ven-tured north to Washington, D.C., in1965, coming alone. She was 17. Shehad dropped out of school in the tenthgrade, given birth and left her sonbehind to be raised by her mother.

In Washington, Smith found work atvarious places, butby 1973, she was onwelfare. the mother of three morechildren. and living with them in acramped apartment. That November,in search of more room. she reluctant-ly moved into the Ritz, an apartmentbuilding in the Adams-Morgan sectionwhich, despi te i ts name, was in

wretched condi t ion and "a l i t t ledangerous." The elevator in the five-story tenement did not work, and therewere no trash pickups. Frustratedresidents left their garbage in hallways,threw it out windows, dropped it downstairwells. The stench was terrible, therats were big.

Unbeknown to Smith, the 60-unitRitz and a smaller apartment buildingnearby, the Mozart, had just beenbought by Jim Rouse.

Rouse , who rema ined i n t hebackground, was acting in concert withBarbara Moore and several other mem-bers of the Church of the Saviour inWashington, who had formed JubileeHousing, .a non-profit corporation.Jubilee leased the two buildings fromRouse and ran them. (In 1978. withfunds it raised and a mortgage fromRouse, Jubilee bought the buildingfrom him.)

"When Jubilee came in," Rosa Smithremembers, "l didn't like them, and noone else in the building l iked them,because we assumed that these whitepeople were coming to clean up thebuilding and move all of us out."

Then Smith went to one of Jubilee'sSaturday work parties and discoveredthat she could use a hammer and paintbrush. In those early years, volunteersat the two buildings put in more than50,000 hours, working to correct hun-dreds of housing-code violations.

Rosa Smith later became the salariedmanager of the Ritz and the Mozart.She is one of Jubilee's success stories.There are others.

Jubilee acquired more buildings, gota $1.5 mill ion HUD grant in 7978 andwon increasing corporate support.Jubilee also spawned allied enterprises,among them Jubilee Jobs, a nonprofitemployment agency which last yearplaced 558 people in unskil led jobs.

Stil l , "This is tough stuff," Rouseobserves. "There aren't poor people sit-t ing there, just waiting to be served,and in go white people and they fix upapartments and it all goes along in amerry way. These are real battle-grounds where this is going on."

The example of Jubilee, dealing with"broken people" as much as brokenbuildings, inspired more than just thecreation of several similar groups inBaltimore, Oakland and elsewhere.Jubilee led Rouse to create Enterprise,

and now the Enterprise network hasgrown, at last count, to 42 neighbor-hood groups in 22 cit ies, among themDenver, Dallas, Detroit, Chicago andPhiladelphia.

The foundation's assistance comes invarious forms. Enterprise has providedmore than $5 million in loans and somegrants. "We generally see our moneyas what we call l inchpin money," ex-plains Rouse. "lt's money to tie togetherother money that we can bring in to dothat Iparticular] project." Enterprisealso offers technical advice on rehabil-itation and financing. It has set up agroup to find new ways to cut rehabil-itation costs, and it has established afor-profit subsidiary to raise money atlow rates.

With help from Enterprise, morethan 1,200 housing units have been orare being rehabil itated, according toEdward Quinn, the f oundat ion 'spresident.

That, of course, is nowhere near the8.7 mill ion very-low-income house-holds in America said to be living inrental housing that is physically inade-quate, too crowded or too costly.

Rouse and Qu inn f r ee l yacknowledge that only with federalmoney and cit ies'involvement can themassive problem be solved. Mean-while, however, there are people inneighborhoods, people with money-and Enterprise.

"Our whole conviction," Quinn sayspassionate ly , " is that there arethousands, hundreds of thousands,mill ions of people out there who real-ly want to do good. If you provide aprocess where people with resources,even modest resources, can be l inkedup with people with needs. . . thenyou'l l f ind people responding."

Whether people en masse wil l res-pond so generously to the plight of theil l-housed poor remains to be seen.More certain, however, is their wil l-,ingness to spend money on themselvesat Rouse-style marketplaces. TheWaterside, a $13.8 mill ion develop-ment on the Elizabeth River in Norfolk,was Enterprise Development's firstmajor project. A joint venture with thecity, it opened in 1983 and, by everyaccount, has been a huge success. Andit not only created about 1,300 newjobs but also stimulated, by some esti-mates, more than $100 mill ion in fresh

"We belieae uJe'rezuorking on a problemof crucial importanceto our country andour ciui l izat ion."

investments downtown.Speaking one night last winter in the

Grand Ballroom of New York's PlazaHotel, Rouse told the well-dressedflower of the construction industry inhis earnest and passionate way: "We'reworking through a foundation with thementality of business, with an entre-preneurial spirit. . . instead of juststanding back before these problemsand looking for government help . . . .We believe we're working on a problemof crucial importance to our countryand our civil ization."

And Jim Rouse does not seem todoubt seriously that the problem iscapable of rational solution. He is, onprinciple, an optimist. "l don't feelobliged to be practical, in the commonjudgment of what's practical," he ex-plains. "I feel that it is legitimate tosearch for the best that might be andtry to make it happen, rather than tosearch for all the practical reasons thatwil l prevent what might be."

His th ink ing seems resolute lyhopeful, rather than foolishly wishful.He well knows that his dreams may gounfulfi l led, but sti l l he is doing his im-pressive best now on behalf of thepoor-and hoping the rest of ginger-bread humanity wil l join him. HP

Robert K. Landers is a usriter uith theVoice of America in Washington, D.C.

U E C E M B E R I Y d 5 b J

zoThe Illusionist's ArtBy Regina SchramblingPhotographs by Bob SachaUsing time-honored techniques,wood grainer Marylou Davis turnsordinary pine into shimmeringhardwoods and marble.

t tczBig Gamble in New HavenBy Andrew AlexanderPhotographs by Bob SachaNovel plans to revitalize adowntown district hinge on gettinglandowners to pool their propertyand money.

38Country TreasuresBy William SealePhotographs by Erik KualsuikSpectacular country houses ownedby the National Trust recallAmerica's architectural debtto Br i ta in.

50Survival StoryBy Augusta MutchlerAfter restoring a Texas farmhouse,a good-humored homeowner recallsthe ordeal.

52The Lighthouse: EndangeredSpecies?By Rachel Cox and Michael BotakerIn an age of automation, thesurvival of a beloved anachronismdepends on community act ion andcreative new uses.

60The Conscience offames RouseBy Robert LandersA vision of decent housing for thepoor now drives the man who gaveus the "fest ival marketplace."

From the EditorOur Global VillageLettersFocus on the TrustA Tennessee UtopiaOpen House:Cupertino, Calif,;Hyattsuille, Md.Home WorkWorking With WindoutsVenturesBaltimore, Md.;Lexington, Ky.BooksAII About Bungalorus;Holiday Book ListMoneysworthCutting Corners onContractorsGoing PlacesGrand ResortsAfterWordsJust a Little Train Trip

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