Two Rousing Profiles
Of James Rouse's Legacy

We owe the suburban transformation of American life to many powerful forces, not least to cheap land and Detroit's assembly lines, but if we feel the need to find a single culprit -- or hero -- it's easy to seize on James Rouse.

A visionary developer with boundless energy but no formal training, Rouse (1914-96) had a greater effect on America's 20th-century built environment than almost anyone short of Henry Ford and Alfred P. Sloan. He was an early advocate of "urban renewal" -- that is, bulldozing old buildings. Like the architect Victor Gruen, he pioneered the shopping mall, both as a business and as a gathering point in suburbs dominated by cars and far-flung neighborhoods. To help revive older cities, he created the "festival marketplace," most famously with Boston's Quincy Market and Baltimore's Harborplace.

No developer had better intentions. When he created the city of Columbia on a tract of Maryland farmland, Rouse insisted that blacks be permitted to buy homes right alongside whites -- then a controversial idea. And when he retired he devoted himself to housing the poor and trying to improve one of Baltimore's worst neighborhoods.

Throughout his career Rouse sought to prove that doing what was best for people could be profitable, and in more ways than just the bottom line. He could be irresistibly persuasive and almost insanely optimistic. He was certainly a classic workaholic entrepreneur who readily bet the company on a project and lost interest once it took flight.

Unfortunately, Rouse's career points in the other direction, too -- highlighting much that is wrong with postwar development. Urban renewal vies with tornadoes and rent control as one of the worst things that can afflict a city. Shopping malls sap the life out of downtowns. And festival marketplaces have devolved, in some places, into banal waterfront malls. Rouse bequeathed us sprawl and Disneyfication as much as convenient shopping and urban renaissance.

Two books now attempt to assess the Rousean legacy, although in different ways. "Better Places, Better Lives"(The Urban Land Institute, 442 pages, $34.95) is a thoughtful and mostly admiring biography by Joshua Olsen, a former Fulbright scholar who now works for a real-estate company. He artfully brings Rouse to life while addressing the social questions that hover around his busy career.

One of the book's strengths is reminding us of the role that government has played in the way America is built. Rouse parked cars during the Depression but got his start in real estate by originating government-insured home mortgages in Baltimore under the new Federal Housing Administration. The FHA revitalized the housing market, but its regulations required minimum distances between neighboring homes and between homes and the street. Baltimore rowhouses did not meet these requirements, but builders made sure that new suburban homes did.

The FHA thus put Uncle Sam in the business of leading America's most creditworthy middle-class citizens away from cities, something it would do again and again. The interstate highway system, for example, opened up vast territories for those who could afford a car and a mortgage. And zoning laws discouraged multifamily structures or densely arranged ones. Sprawl is hated in many quarters today, but reformers "at first applauded" it, Mr. Olsen notes, presuming that city dwellers were desperate for light and air.

Mr. Olsen acknowledges that much of what Rouse did undermined Baltimore and other struggling cities, but he knows that the story is complicated. Older cities had been on the decline since before World War II, and middle-class America was headed for the hills anyway. Like Gruen the shopping-mall pioneer, Rouse tried to channel the flight into something constructive. When he proposed founding Columbia, Md., even anti-growth politicians in rural Howard County approved the project. It was obvious to them that the whole place would be overrun by development sooner or later. With Columbia, they felt, the development might at least produce a real place, with a sense of community. By and large, they were right.

"Merchant of Illusion" (The Ohio State University Press, 223 pages, $49.95) is a more critical work by Nicholas Dagen Bloom, a son of Baltimore who is now a professor at the New York Institute of Technology. While acknowledging Rouse's decency, Mr. Bloom casts him as the avatar of a devious-sounding form of business-led urban (and suburban) planning, itself a response to "the growth of global socialism." The purpose of such planning, Mr. Bloom argues, was to head off not just a Soviet- or European- style welfare state but also what the author sees as a better balance between public and private action in metropolitan areas.

Whether a different balance would have resulted in a superior outcome is hard to say. Certainly "public action" has played a big role in producing what we already have. The lack of school choice, to cite a single example, drives even reluctant families into the suburbs while isolating the urban poor.

The plain fact is that Americans seem to prefer suburban life. They like driving everywhere and having a yard. In the 1970s and 1980s, they came to like such things all the more when governments failed to make cities safe. James Rouse wasn't responsible for these forces. The question is whether he made their effects better or worse. As with so much in life, the answer is probably: both.

-- Mr. Akst is a writer in Tivoli, N.Y.

Email your comments to rjeditor@dowjones.com.