Tom Cousins obit

Atlanta real estate developer and philanthropist Tom Cousins dies

 

He was not on the list.

Atlanta real estate developer and philanthropist Tom Cousins has died, a source close to the family confirmed late Tuesday night. He was 93.

Cousins built a real estate empire in Atlanta. By the early 1960s, he was the largest homebuilder in Georgia. Later, he developed towers that shaped the Atlanta skyline like the Bank of America Plaza and brought the Hawks to town in 1968, the first NBA franchise in the Deep South.

But it was his role in transforming the struggling East Lake Meadows public housing complex into a thriving mixed-income community that became his signature achievement.

“We were going to basically fund the unfundable,” Cousins said at a forum in 2013. “And we were going to try to get some solutions to these problems.”

The problem was a sprawling one. “Public housing started in Atlanta in 1935,” said Carol Noughton, a former lawyer at the Atlanta Housing Authority. “We built more public housing in Atlanta per capita than any other city in the country and in large part because it was built in a segregated manner.”

By the nineties, Noughton said Atlanta’s public housing was deteriorating.

“Housing units were dilapidated,” she said. “People weren’t thriving and in Atlanta, certainly in the East Lake neighborhood, it had become a very hard place to live.”

A very hard place to live

The apartments were old and the city had let them fall into disrepair. The community was notorious for crime and plagued by poverty. Around this time, a new way of thinking about public housing was emerging and Tom Cousins was among the first to embrace it.

Rather than isolating the poor in a housing complex without easy access to good schools and jobs, the new East Lake would be developed through a public-private partnership and have a charter school, a grocery store, and a YMCA.

Cousins also bought the historic East Lake Golf Course nearby, intending its restoration to spur revitalization in the neighborhood around it.

“This would not have worked if we just built some nice new apartments,” he said in 2013. “What was wrong with urban renewal, we just picked people up and put them over here. We didn’t change the environment.”

East Lake’s holistic approach has largely been heralded as a success story, but it has been criticized for displacing some of the most vulnerable residents — such as people with criminal records or substance abuse problems who had nowhere else to go. Today, Atlanta still struggles to house its lowest income residents.

Cousins said he was driven by a deep belief in creating opportunity for all Atlantans.

“These children had no choice where they were born,” he said. “It could have been anyone of you. We all could have been born in a circumstance like that.”

Quintessential Atlantan

The strategy piloted in East Lake has popped up in many other states, spurred in part by a foundation Cousins co-founded called Purpose Built Communities. Carol Noughton, the former Housing Authority lawyer, is now CEO.

“I think Tom Cousins is a uniquely, quintessential Atlantan,” she said. “The way that manifests itself is in this blend of optimism and possibility and that we can aspire to great things. And I think that’s part of Atlanta’s DNA.”

Former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin said Cousins’ life in a way helps tell the story of Atlanta in the second half of the 20th century. Cousins was the chief executive officer of Cousins Properties until 2002 and served as chairman until 2006.

“What was defined at that time as the New South, built on the successes of the South, but acknowledged the racial gaps, and was prepared to do things to accelerate the success of the whole city, but especially the success of people who had been left out for hundreds of years,” she said.

While Atlanta is sometimes criticized for the cozy relationship with corporations, Franklin said these partnerships between business, philanthropy and government have helped the city do big things.

“The vast majority of his work has moved the city and the region ahead by leaps and bounds, in and out of recessions, racial tensions,” Franklin said. “Tom Cousins is one of the most significant persons in the development of modern Atlanta.”

In April 1968, Cousins purchased the NBA's St. Louis Hawks basketball team and moved them to Atlanta. At the time Atlanta did not have a major-league caliber arena, but Cousins was building a local arena complex. Cousins also owned the Atlanta Flames until he sold them in 1980 for approximately $16 million to a consortium from Calgary. He purchased the original Atlanta Chiefs soccer club of the North American Soccer League from the Braves in 1973, during this time they were renamed the Atlanta Apollos.

In 1993 Tom Cousins was the recipient of the Bill Hartman Award which recognises former varsity athletes from the University of Georgia who have demonstrated excellence in their profession. On March 8, 2010, Cousins was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2010 Atlanta Sports Awards for his role in promoting sports in Atlanta.

In 1995 Cousins purchased East Lake Golf Club and restored it to its former glory. He also helped to establish East Lake as the permanent home of the TOUR Championship which is the season-ending tournament for the PGA TOUR. Profits from East Lake Golf Club go to the East Lake Foundation which in turn goes to help the East Lake Community.