It has been three months since land developer David Forester retired from his job with the Rouse Co.

Since then, he has indulged in traveling and bike riding. He has spent time with his five grandchildren. He even has lost himself in a few books.

One thing he hasn't done, however, is leave his work behind. Forester lives in Columbia, a city he spent 25 years helping to grow as the senior development director at Rouse. And every time he walks out of his house in Hobbit's Glen, he sees evidence of his work - in the houses, shopping centers, roads and business complexes. It's even in the trees.

"See that row of trees over there," said Forester, driving through one of Columbia's 10 villages on a recent afternoon. "I plotted the land right around them."

Forester, 66, was recently honored with a lifetime achievement award from the Home Builders Association of Maryland. During his career at Rouse, he worked on 69 development projects - 49 of them residential, 20 of them business. It's a total that executives at Rouse estimate to include at least 30 percent of Columbia's 14,000 acres.

"David's spent 25 years working with the ongoing development of Columbia - interacting with everyone from the builders to the residents," said Joseph H. Necker Jr., vice president and director of engineering at Rouse. "That's no small feat. If you look at a map of what wasn't here in 1967 and one of what's here now, he's contributed to a lot of that."

Steve Breeden, a developer for Security Development Corp., agreed: "David is the land man in Columbia. The expectations were set really high for Columbia and he helped to meet them. From the beginning, he was there."

Forester's career at Rouse began in 1976, when he and his family moved to Columbia from Upstate New York. At the time, the city was in the early stages of development, with a population of about 40,000 - compared with more than 88,000 today.

Forester's job was to work with the land from its raw state to the end-stages of development - a process that began, quite simply, by walking.

"I've walked all over," Forester said. "I'd come out here with a team of people and we'd just walk up and down hills, plotting out where everything was going to go."

Forester's job also involved pricing the land, negotiating approvals from the city and state, selling the plots to builders, retaining architects and communicating with citizen groups.

"Most people's concept of what goes into land development is just the houses themselves," he said. "But there's a lot more to it."

One of the projects Forester said he's most proud of is River Hill, a village he started working on in the 1980s that is still in development. The last of Columbia's 10 villages, River Hill is a 1,745-acre community - more than 50 percent of it open space.

"Columbia has over 5,300 acres of open space," he said. "We've made a huge effort to preserve."

Still, he said, one of the greatest challenges of his job was garnering public support for projects. "One of the best ways to galvanize a community is to put up a sign that says 'Development Coming.'"

After a slight pause, Forester added: "But in all these years, I've never had someone come up to me and shake a fist in my face."

Jennifer Blake, a former chair of the board for the Village of River Hill, said she thinks Forester grew more attentive to citizens' needs over time.

"I saw a lot of growth in David over the years," she said. "Initially, he wasn't used to our board being as involved and active as we were. But once he realized that our concerns were going to keep coming up, he responded to them. He was always willing to come to the table and try to accommodate our needs."

Born and raised in Illinois, Forester earned a graduate degree in city planning from Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. (he did his undergraduate work at Rutgers University in economics and city planning).

After school, he remained in New York, where he worked as a private land developer.

He lives in a contemporary Columbia house with his wife, an amateur photographer. The couple have four children, three of whom reside in Columbia.

Although there's little land left for development in Columbia, Forester said, the city still has the feel of a boomtown. "There's a real dynamic here that things are growing and changing," he said.

"For me, the ultimate satisfaction comes from driving through this city and seeing all the things that I've worked on," he said. "It's a really wonderful feeling."