By Jimmy Roberts
A great man passed away last month, and as we go about our business, let’s take a moment to remember him. Maybe you’ve heard this story, but I don’t feel like I can ever tell it enough.
In the mid-1990s, Atlanta’s East Lake area was among the most blighted and dangerous neighborhoods in the United States. The crime rate was 18 times the national average. Only 13% of those who lived in the housing project at the community’s center, East Lake Meadows, were employed, and an incomprehensible 90% were the victims of crime. It was such a treacherous place, it came to be known as "Little Vietnam" because of the constant gunfire.
In December of 1993, Tom Cousins, a successful real estate entrepreneur, was sitting in his Atlanta home reading an op-ed in The New York Times by Todd Clear, a professor of criminal justice at Rutgers who wrote that 70% of those in New York State prisons came from just eight neighborhoods in New York City.
Cousins was shocked. Could poverty and circumstance, he wondered, really do this to human beings?
When it was pointed out to him that his own hometown had just such a damaged community ... he sprang into action.
Just across the street from East Lake Meadows sat the historic East Lake Golf Club, not only the site of the 1963 Ryder Cup, but also the place where Bobby Jones had learned to play the game. As the neighborhood spiraled down into the abyss from the late ’60s onward, the club followed suit, and by the ’90s, it had become nothing more than a tattered shell of something once great.
Cousins had a novel idea. He was going to use golf and this once great club to “fix” the neighborhood.
First, with his own money, he bought the club and restored the course and facilities. Next, he put the arm on his many friends in corporate America to join. A portion of what they paid would go to membership, but a larger portion would go into a foundation. Eventually, with the help of Jimmy Carter, Cousins was able to secure a federal housing grant, which, when combined with the foundation’s considerable nest egg, was used to purchase “Little Vietnam.”
The housing project was razed and replaced with a mixed-income community. People paying market rate would live side-by-side with those receiving assistance. The idea was for the market raters to help “bootstrap” up their neighbors.
A community center was built, and then, the most crucial component: a school.
The results have been remarkable.
In 1995, approximately 5% of fifth graders at East Lake’s elementary school achieved the state math standard. In 2024, 72.5% of those same-aged kids at the community’s new Charles R. Drew Charter School met or exceeded the benchmark. The neighborhood elementary school that originally ranked last out of 69 elementary schools in the city is now consistently among Atlanta Public Schools’ top 10 highest performing.
This “holistic” approach to community building has yielded other benefits as well: All eligible adults are working or in job training compared to a 13.5% employment rate in 1995. And the neighborhood has seen a 92% reduction in violent crime.
Meanwhile, one of the country’s initial “First Tee” programs was started across the street at the East Lake Golf Club. The community's kids not only had an opportunity to learn a new game and its positive values, but they could also become caddies … a way to earn money and potential college scholarships through the Evans Scholars Foundation.
It didn’t take much time: East Lake has been transformed from a problem into a solution; the model so successful that Cousins, along with Julian Robertson and Warren Buffett, started an enterprise called “Purpose Built Communities,” which is in the process of replicating East Lake’s remarkable example in 27 other American cities.
For a decade, a group of us, including Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, tried to have Cousins awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But while presidents from both parties awarded a parade of athletes and entertainers the honor – impactful people no doubt – they ignored Cousins. What a shame.
Tom Cousins was a truly great man who changed people’s lives. I hope he’s remembered for a long, long time. I know I’ll never forget him.