By Susan DeFord
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 11, 2006

Patty Rouse seemed embarrassed at the idea that she distinguished herself even as a teenager. But it's there in her bio: In 1942, at age 16, she became the first female to skipper a sailboat in the Labor Day regatta in her hometown of Norfolk. Who taught her to sail a 17-foot-long craft?

"I really sort of picked that up on my own," she said, as if describing how she learned to roller skate. "First I had a rowboat. Then I got a sailboat . . . I was interested in being out on the water.

"I depended on the boys in the neighborhood to help me with the sailing," she added. "I had a boy crew."

Apparently, something about this adventure suited Rouse, because throughout her life, she has found a way to be a driving force in situations where one does not expect to find someone so unassuming and traditionally ladylike.

Rouse's public identity in Howard County was shaped by her 22-year marriage to Columbia's developer, James W. Rouse. With her wide smile and soft Virginia drawl, she appeared comfortable in the role of loving helpmate, content to let her renowned husband draw the spotlight for his progressive ideas about cities and urban renewal. But in the decade after Rouse's death in 1996, Patty Rouse's own commitment to social causes has been demonstrated by her continued work at Enterprise Community Partners Inc., the nationally known affordable-housing nonprofit that she and her husband founded.

"Jim and Patty were very much a team," said Bart Harvey, chairman and chief executive of Enterprise. While Jim Rouse delved into the particulars of financing low-income housing, Patty Rouse "looked at the human side of things."

Last week, in honor of her 80th birthday, a large crowd of Enterprise employees gathered beside Lake Kittamaqundi to sing "Happy Birthday" and warmly applaud her with the unveiling of a new state highway sign that renames a four-mile stretch of Route 175 between Route 29 and Interstate 95 as the Jim and Patty Rouse Parkway.

"I didn't come here planning to make a speech," she said. "I don't deserve all this. I don't think an old lady, like I am, has ever had a birthday like this."

Her humbleness is endearing, but it coexists with solid determination.

The daughter of a homemaker and civil engineer, Rouse graduated with honors in 1948 from Sweet Briar College, a women's institution north of Lynchburg. She married a law student at the University of Virginia and set aside plans for graduate school to raise their four children. She also made time to volunteer with a host of community groups in Norfolk.

Her "backdoor neighbor," who was also the mayor of Norfolk, appointed her in 1969 as the first female commissioner of the city's Redevelopment and Housing Authority. She served on the authority until 1975.

"Women had to be very careful in the '60s when they were the only woman on a board," she recalled during an interview at her Enterprise office near Lake Kittamaqundi. "One of the first things I asked the commissioners on the housing authority was if they had been out to see the housing. They hadn't, so very soon we took a tour of the public housing units. They needed help. It was very interesting seeing how people lived."

When her first marriage ended in the early 1970s, Rouse revived her plans for graduate school, pursuing urban studies at Old Dominion University in Norfolk. Friends called her one day in 1973 and tried to talk her into a tennis date. She put them off because of her studies, but they persisted, and on the tennis courts she was partnered with a divorced developer from Maryland -- James W. Rouse. They married the next year.

The couple lived in a suburban home on the shoreline of Wilde Lake in Columbia, the planned community where her husband "wanted the boss and the janitor to live in the same neighborhood," she said. The Rouses increasingly focused on working with Jubilee Housing Inc., a religious, nonprofit organization in Washington that began buying and rehabilitating old apartment buildings in 1973. James Rouse was one of the first members of Jubilee Housing's board of directors, and Patty Rouse currently serves on the Jubilee board.

After her husband retired as chief executive of the Rouse Co., they founded in 1982 what they first named the Enterprise Foundation, a nonprofit that they hoped would duplicate on a national scale Jubilee's innovative methods for providing low-income people with decent housing.

In its 24 years of devising public-private partnerships with financial institutions, governments and community groups, Enterprise has raised and invested $7 billion in low-income areas and currently invests at the rate of $1 billion a year. The money has created 190,000 affordable homes and provided services to the needy. Enterprise has opened offices in Washington, Baltimore, New York and 15 other cities, but its national office remains in the American City Building in downtown Columbia.

That is where Rouse reports to work daily as an unsalaried vice president and secretary, keeping a small office stacked with files and adorned with photos, plaques and awards she has collected through the years. Rouse will ask, "Is our money really going to the neediest people? She's our keeper of our vision," Harvey said. She often wears a shiny pin that is a replica of the Enterprise symbol -- a home backlit by rays of light.

"I'll be around until I'm a burden to people. I don't want to get in the way," said Rouse, who traveled this week to view the nonprofit's rebuilding efforts in New Orleans.

"Jim used to say that working here with the Enterprise Foundation was the most important thing he had done."

It is for her, too.