The year is 1993, and the streets of Atlanta’s East Lake neighborhood have a sinister feel. Storefronts are boarded up, and burned-out cars rust in vacant lots. Many of the homes that have not been abandoned have bars on their windows and doors. Drug dealers and hookers stagger in and out of the crack houses that proliferate, and gunfire breaks out so frequently at the East Lake Meadows public housing project that locals have taken to calling it “Little Vietnam.” Someone has painted a giant skull and crossbones on one of the buildings there. Appropriately, another bit of graffiti reads: “Dead End.”
Set in the center of that rundown area is East Lake Golf Club. Many years before, it had been a refined retreat for Atlanta’s well-to-do. Bobby Jones learned to play the game there, as did 1938 British Amateur champion Charlie Yates and three-time U.S. Women’s Amateur winner Alexa Stirling. East Lake also hosted the 1963 Ryder Cup. But in the early 1990s, thugs are robbing golfers at gunpoint on the Donald Ross-designed course, and the few people who still play there joke about doubling bets whenever police sirens start to blare, and dropping quickly to the turf if a nearby car backfires.
Things begin to change, however, when a charitable foundation led by Atlanta real estate magnate Tom Cousins and his wife, Ann, purchases the golf club. At first, he is looking to preserve the historic retreat, which his parents joined during World War II and where he learned to play the game. But then Cousins comes to believe that the club also can serve as a catalyst for turning around its blighted neighborhood. So, he begins spearheading a redevelopment project to do just that.
It seemed a wildly ambitious notion, especially given the sorry state of that community and the difficulty working effectively with government agencies and local tenant groups. But the East Lake Foundation found a way to make it happen, pouring millions of dollars into the project while also soliciting significant assistance from local corporations. Anyone touring the East Lake neighborhood today would have a hard time believing how bad things were just three decades prior. People have fixed up and moved into previously run-down abodes. Lawns are neatly mowed, and houses freshly painted. Bobby Jones’ old golf course has been restored and, in addition to being ranked regularly among the best in the country, now acts as the permanent home of the annual Tour Championship. The Tudor clubhouse looks just as good, having been transformed into a sort of museum to Jones and other golf champions from East Lake. As for Little Vietnam, which decades before had been built on the site of East Lake’s No. 2 golf course, it is home to a thriving, mixed-income residential community called the Villages of East Lake as well as the Charles R. Drew Charter School, which boasts more than 1,800 students from pre-K to grade 12. Also located there is the YMCA, an executive golf course named after Yates and a driving range and short-game practice facility where golfers can compete in leagues, play nine- and 18-hole rounds and take lessons and clinics from a resident PGA professional. A First Tee operation also is based at the facility.
Just as remarkable is the success of the Charter School, which graduated its inaugural senior class in 2017 and saw all its students receive degrees and gain admission to college. Then there is the school’s golf team, which last year captured the Boys Class A Public Division State Championship.
These are Cinderella stories, to be sure. In hopes of creating more of them, Cousins joined billionaire investor Warren Buffet and renowned hedge fund manager Julian Robertson in 2009 to create Purpose Built Communities. Its goal is to show other neighborhoods in need how to replicate the East Lake success. And it is doing just that in more than a dozen areas of urban distress in cities like Columbus, Ohio; Fort Worth, Texas; and Oakland, Calif. Not all of those involve golf. But they share the goal of pulling people out of poverty by transforming the places where they live and developing what advocates call a “cradle to college pipeline.”
Now 88, Cousins will be long remembered for the buildings he erected in Atlanta and how he helped to fashion the modern skyline of the Georgia capital. He brought professional hockey and basketball to the city. He developed the area’s biggest and best residential golf communities. But his greatest legacy will be saving the East Lake Golf Club and the East Lake neighborhood – and then trying to make that model work throughout the land.
It is a righteous effort, and Cousins has received plenty of accolades for those initiatives. Such as the Bob Jones Award from the USGA in 2001, and the Donald Ross Award from the American Society of Golf Course Architects four years later. But he deserves even greater recognition, for East Lake and also Purpose Built Communities. And nothing would be more appropriate than his induction into the World Golf Hall of Fame.
“I know of no better human being on the planet than Tom Cousins,” says fellow Georgian and former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn. “He walks in the shoes of those who are less fortunate and then takes action based on those experiences to change and improve their lives. He sees things that others cannot see. He has an amazing ability to ask the right questions and quickly get to the core of a problem. He does good, and he does it well.”
Adds Rick Burton, a longtime associate of Cousins’ who worked as the head golf professional and general manager of the East Lake Golf Club for many years before becoming its chief executive officer: “Tom thinks big, and then he acts big. He also knows how to get things done, and done right.”
Born in 1931, Cousins grew up in Atlanta and went to the University of Georgia, where he graduated in 1952 from the Terry College of Business with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. After serving a hitch in the Air Force, he made his first foray in real estate, selling pre-fab homes. Then in 1958, Cousins and his father started a real estate company, and Cousins made his mark from there, developing such iconic Atlanta buildings in later years as the CNN Center, the Omni Coliseum and the Bank of America tower, which is the tallest structure in the city.
Along the way Cousins involved himself heavily in philanthropy, which is what brought him back to East Lake. He says that the true inspiration for that move came after reading an article in The New York Times that made this startling point: Some 70 percent of those incarcerated in New York state prisons came from just eight neighborhoods in New York City. Eight very poor and broken-down neighborhoods.
“I know of no better human being on the planet than Tom Cousins.”
– Former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn
“I was staggered by that finding and by the impact that poverty and circumstance had on families,” he said. “That led me to thinking of how we could break that cycle, and how we could do more than by just throwing money at the problem.”
As best as Cousins could determine, the keys included providing educational opportunities with good schools, good teachers and good principles.
“We also recognized that we needed to develop role models for the children growing up in East Lake,” he said. “When we first started to look at it, only 14 of the 650 housing units in ‘Little Vietnam’ had a male head of household. And the average age of a grandmother there was 32 years old.
“We knew that we had to build something different, and what we came up with was a 500-unit, mixed-income housing complex. The hope, in part, was to create role models, so youngsters could see people coming and going to work each day and taking care of their homes. All they had known before then were drug dealers and thieves.”
Then, there was what Cousins called the “third leg,” which was wellness – and which was what led to the idea of building a 50,000-square foot YMCA. It was also why he made golf a critical part of the initiative. It provided exercise as well as employment (in the form of caddying jobs at the East Lake Golf Club) and the sorts of life lessons that the game is so good as giving.
“That is what makes East Lake so unique from the beginning,” Nunn said. “I don’t think anyone had ever before tried to use golf in such a noble and necessary way.”
Cousins called it “golf with a purpose.” And that worked so well in East Lake that in 2009, he combined forces with Buffett and Robertson to create Purpose Built Communities.
Cousins says the concept for that is quite simple. “It’s like dropping a pebble in the pond,” he explains. “That’s what we did with East Lake, and now the waves are going out from there.”
According to Rob Johnston, the head of an Atlanta property management firm and the longtime general chairman of the Tour Championship, the East Lake model that Tom Cousins conceived is perfect. “The problem is, there are no other Tom Cousins,” said Johnston, who also sits on the East Lake Foundation board.
Alex Robertson, the son of Purpose Built Communities co-founder Julian Robertson and a member of that organization’s board, agrees. “That is why we focus so much on finding people in local communities to lead the efforts we establish there,” he said. “The key is finding others like Tom Cousins.”
There are not many of those, which is why his legacy is so strong – and why his becoming a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame is so important.