A developer and lifeguard who protected people on Jacksonville’s oceanfront for three decades, Maurice “Mo” Rudolph has mastered the waves of economic shifts and the prospects they offer for serving others.
Now he has a new opportunity to make a splash.
On July 1, Rudolph, 47, became the chairman of the Urban Land Institute North Florida District Council. It is a two-year position overseeing more than 500 members in a region stretching from Jacksonville to Pensacola.
The Urban Land Institute is a worldwide, nonprofit research and education organization that promotes thriving communities through responsible land use, sustainability, smart growth and workforce housing.
Most of its 500 members in the Jacksonville, Tallahassee and Gainesville areas are real estate agents and brokers, attorneys, city planners, engineers and leaders in the construction industry.
“The Urban Land Institute is on the leading edge of new trends and initiatives in real estate and development,” said Rudolph, vice president of land operations at CalAtlantic Homes, noting that the organization serves as a resource for private business and the government.
In 2016, Rudolph stepped down as board chairman of the North Florida Chapter of the American Red Cross to spend more time with his wife, Dawn, and their children, Mason and Madison, and to assume a larger role with the institute.
Rudolph said his more than 30 years with the Red Cross “gave him the experience the Urban Land Institute was looking for.”
Spending his early childhood in Costa Rica, Rudolph quipped that he learned English watching the 1980s action-comedy show, “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
At age 16, he joined the Jacksonville Beach station of the American Red Cross Volunteer Life Saving Corps, volunteering for duty on weekends and holidays to move up the ranks. Later, he lived at the station while attending college.
It was there Rudolph said he learned the gift of giving. “What that organization taught me is to give first before you receive,” he said. “That was the basis for everything else to come.”
In his three decades with the Red Cross Life Saving Corps, he served as second mate, quartermaster, registrar, instructor and captain, a position he held twice before becoming president and, finally, board chairman.
In 2006, Rudolph received the Rescue Pin — one of the Corps’ highest honors — after saving a 4-year-old from drowning at Jacksonville Beach. The next year, following a series of beach drownings in Peru, Rudolph and eight other lifeguards traveled to that country to teach open water rescue.
In preparation for the lifeguard station’s 100th anniversary in 2012, Rudolph started a fundraising campaign to restore the boat room and add a training room. The effort raised $500,000, and the training room was named after him.
Professionally, Rudolph had been the senior vice president at Montgomery Land Company, where he led the development of projects such as the Amelia National Golf & Country Club in Fernandina Beach. But by 2008, Jacksonville’s economy, much of it previously fueled by construction growth, was suffering from the housing market collapse and mounting foreclosures.
Rudolph switched gears, becoming the program construction manager of Jacksonville’s Neighborhood Stabilization Program, a federal program that helps local governments acquire, rehabilitate and re-sell foreclosed homes to halt neighborhood blight and the decline of property values. He said the effort opened his eyes to the complex economic relationships between families, neighborhoods and the city as a whole.
“It brought awareness to me of the issues,” he said.
Rudolph said he’s attracted to the Urban Land Institute in large part because it’s politically neutral, offering only studies, market data, experts and other educational resources. “There’s no agenda, just facts,” he said. “We can use our experts to help the city grow and provide the resources they need.”
While affordable housing, downtown redevelopment and greater engagement with city planners promise to be top agenda items, Rudolph said he wouldn’t set the institute’s priorities until the July strategic planning meeting. He said he’s also considering a “light version” of Leadership Jacksonville — a yearlong program that brings together more than 50 community leaders to build relationships and serve as a community trustee — that would focus on land use and development.
Rudolph applauded his predecessors at the North Florida Council of the Urban Land Institute, who adopted programs that encourage women’s involvement in the business side of real estate and to teach high school students about zoning and development and role of local politics.
“I’m really, really lucky to walk into an organization that doesn’t have issues to deal with,” Rudolph said.