How golf transformed a blighted neighborhood

ATLANTA - For years, the East Lake housing project here was one of the worst places in America — crumbling and crime-ridden. Today, it has been transformed by a businessman who brought his passion, his money and, of all things, his love for the game of golf.

Eva Davis moved into the East Lake Meadows housing project in 1971.  It wasn’t long before murder and mayhem became a way of life.

“Two guys got in a fight right across in front of my house,” she said. “I saw one peep his head around the corner.  Pow, pow, pow.  It was just like you was in a Western movie.

"He ran right by my car and blood was just shooting out of his body. That guy shot him and he fell dead right before my face.“

The 650-unit housing project was never a great place to live. But when drugs took over and gangs claimed turf, it went from bad to horrible in a hurry.

“They would shoot and cut and stab and kill each other,” she said. “That's what they did."

By 1995, the crime rate was 18 times the national average.  Shirley Franklin, now Atlanta’s mayor, remembers the old East Lake well. 

“I would never go into East Lake Meadows alone,” she said. “The statistics suggested it was just awful — that it was a completely dysfunctional community.”

And then, in the early '90s, an unlikely savior came seemingly from out of nowhere: Tom Cousins, an Atlanta philanthropist and developer from the other side of town who was worth more than $300 million.

Cousins is a soft-spoken, self-effacing Atlanta business legend, who says that while he knows how much square footage he’s built, he’s lost track of how much money he’s given away. His skyscrapers dot the downtown skyline; he brought pro basketball and hockey to town, and he built the tallest building in the U.S. outside New York and Chicago.

But the broken-down housing project in East Lake Meadows was like nothing he’d ever encountered.

“It was almost beyond description,” he said. “It was just trash everywhere. Windows broken out of the apartments. Crime was rampant. ... (There was) no attempt to hide the drug dealing and drug selling on the streets.”

Cousins' interest in East Lake began when he read a 1993 newspaper article that described how 70 percent of New York state prisoners came from just eight neighborhoods. Atlanta’s police chief told him there were even fewer Georgia neighborhoods mass-producing criminals.  The worst by far: East Lake Meadows.

“I drove out there; I could not believe it,” he said. “Hundreds of kids out on the streets.  And I thought to myself, had I been born there, I'd probably be one of those people in jail if they could have caught me.” 

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