TOM COUSINS: I want to talk really only about this, and I know you're here because of the golf, and that's what your principal interest is, but I hope that I can enlist support, and I want to explain why, for what is our mission. I mean, we had started in the neighborhood before we had -- before the old East Lake Golf Club got into financial trouble. It had been in trouble for 20 years, but finally the courts ordered the sale of it and we bought it, but we had already begun what we're doing.
There's much great things to be said about East Lake, and you'll be covered up with that, I know, but I think to understand why we got involved, and what can it mean to other places, is where I hope that maybe I can tweak your interest enough that you'll even take a little bit of time and look at what's next door.
I think I can credit probably a story in the New York Times in 1993 as being a major motivator for our coming and doing this, taking on this whole thing, and it was a story by a professor of Rutgers, who I think was head of the Criminal Justice Department. He writes this article describing a study that had been made of the entire prison population of the State of New York. They wanted to find out -- they looked into the background of every person in jail in the State of New York to see what might be common other than drugs, which is the most common denominator, and they were surprised to find that 74 percent of the entire population in jails had come from just eight neighborhoods in Manhattan.
I read that, and I thought, "my Lord, what we spend on not only government prisons but keeping the jails open and incarcerating people, billions and billions of dollars, we could fix eight neighborhoods." I've been a developer for 50 years, and we've done a lot of housing projects and commercial projects and so forth and been involved in inner city restorations in more than one case. I just know there's a way -- I'd like to think if those eight neighborhoods had been positive areas for kids to grow up in, we could be without three fourths of our prisons.
So anyway, I called the Atlanta Police Department when I read this article and said, "hey, have you read this article." He said "what article," and I told him, and he said "everybody knows about that."
I guess we all know that slums are dangerous and they're bad places and bad things happen to people there, but to think that -- he said, "believe me, everybody knows that, you're not telling me anything new." In fact, in Georgia it's probably five or six neighbors comprises Georgia's entire prison population. He said, "I'll tell you, the worst of them is four and a half miles from downtown called East Lake Meadows; we call it 'Little Vietnam.'" The Atlanta police named it Little Vietnam.
So I drive out there, and I can't believe what I'm seeing, that something like this could exist in our country, just open, on-the-street drug selling. Police said they wouldn't go in there without two cars. It was averaging a murder a week, and it quit making the papers because it was just the same old story.
Anyway, honestly this is why we got involved. I had imagined that had I grown up there -- if you put yourself in that kind of place, what would have happened to you. I was raised by middle-class parents. I mean, they were disciplinarians. I had to be in at 11:00 o'clock at night even when I was in college, and I got spanked two or three times a week because of something bad I did. But to imagine growing up in a place where, first of all, there were 650 apartment units that made up this East Lake Meadows public housing project. There were eight male head-of-households, the grandmothers were raising the children. The average age of the grandmothers was 32. There were some old grandmothers, but the average age was 32. Just think about that.
Now, a child has no choice, has no part of the decision about where he or she is born. I mean, it could happen to you or me or anybody else, but I could understand why places like that are supplying our jails and our prisons. Grow up in that environment just around drugs and crime and hopelessness and fear and a lot of hatred -- anyway, we decided we've been giving money to this and that and the other for 35 years, United Way, this drug program, that program, whatnot, and not ever being able to personally see direct results. We still had plenty of crime, still had all these things.
So we decided, okay, we're going to take on this worst neighborhood and see if we can come up with some solutions that could be applied nationally. This was, from the beginning, our purpose, to come up with a model that could help solve this problem nationally.
I want you to know that it has worked better than any of us ever imagined.
Now, we've been involved -- I think most of you are much too young to even know about urban renewal. There was a federal program after World War II called urban renewal, in which we would go across the country clearing out slums, and the Federal Government destroyed slums across the country, relocating the people that were living there into nice, neat places to live, and we built hundreds of those -- my development company built hundreds of those very nice little houses. We were so proud of them, putting these poor people in these nice places and they got it for nothing down and practically no interest rate, so forth, less than rent. Go back out in five years, it's a slum. So it is not a new place to live. That's just a piece of it.
So we talk about the holistic approach, and what we are doing is taking that child who has no part in why he or she is there and we are surrounding them with care and instruction and attention and discipline. We had to build a school because the school was so lousy out there, we built our own school, and it is something to see, and I would hope some of you might be curious enough to actually go out there and just walk in a classroom and see the faces on these kids. They now smile and they've got hope, and it's the real payoff in this.
But we've been involved with well over a couple thousand kids. It's right at 800, in there, K-8 school that we've built, and we found right off when they got to kindergarten they had no preparation. Nobody told them how to count to ten or ABCs or -- we built a second school. We take them from birth to kindergarten and then from kindergarten to 8th. There's a YMCA that becomes a Phys Ed department for the school and a summer camp program, et cetera, et cetera, built a public golf course, the Charlie Yates Public Golf Course from the Junior Golf Academies, and there's some remarkable stories, and I could bore you with the rest of the afternoon of some of the results in the lives of people, which I think is the most interesting part of the whole story.
But finally, the bottom line is crime has dropped 93 percent from where it was in 1994. Test scores just in the year 2000 and 2001, the test scores improved 45 percent. I mean, kids that were at the absolute bottom of the barrel, we got -- that first year we were in business, we opened up K-5. The fifth graders we got, 80 plus percent of them could not read at the first grade level. Now, they had been promoted through four grades.
Again, a kid being that far behind would have to feel when he or she gets in the broader world, "I'm stupid, I can't keep up," and you can just, again, imagine what happens ultimately to a child like that.
Test scores are up, school dropouts are way down, teenage pregnancy is way down, cost of government is way down, and this is verifiable with the city and the county. Cost of government is way down because you don't need all the police and all the other stuff, and yet revenue for government has gone way up. Property values have soared. There were a lot of abandoned houses, a lot of crack houses when we started here. All of those properties are restored and tax revenue-producing.
Now, why this? This is something, if we could somehow -- I don't know how to communicate it. I don't know whether I'm reaching you or not. But I could tell a story to somebody in Philadelphia or Detroit or somewhere, and they would say, "gosh, that sounds nice." I say, "well, come look because seeing is believing." We are finally getting some things going. Others are coming here. We had over 1,000 groups visit us last year to study the East Lake model, so I think it's going to happen. But it's something that is so obvious that we should be attacking it as a nation. This should be going on in every slum in America.
So we are going to try to reach out to the media, somehow try to tell a story in a way that we can create interest and follow up. Let me finish with that, and I don't know if we're going to have a great deal of time. I don't want to keep you, but if you had any questions, and I hope you do, if you've got any suggestions as to how we can tell the story -- let me say -- people always say, "what is in it for you? Why are you doing this?" You go look at those kids' faces and you'll see why we're doing it. We will help others do it with no charge. In fact, we will contribute money to others to help get this started.
It has been examined for the last ten years by the Atlanta press and everybody else, "there must be something wrong here," and that's one reason why a story doesn't take off is because there ain't nothing wrong (laughter). Thank you for your attention.
Q. I've got two obvious questions, sir. Number one, what you did cost a lot of money obviously, so where did the money come from? Number two, you had to have a lot of people who were hopeless suddenly get hope, and where did they come to trust you in what you were doing?
TOM COUSINS: They were very slow in the trusting part, and they actually fought it in the early days, which I could imagine people trying to help, they were fighting it. People didn't believe us. Now you can pick at random, go in any of those places and knock on the door and ask them what they think. They're our best salesmen.
But it was slow, and that's what we hope we can be now is a model where we can say bring your community leader, bring the head of your public housing project or whatever it is. We'll pay the way to get them here, let them see and talk to their counterpart and get over this. This was our biggest problem for about three years. The money side of it, because we were in a rush to get it done in a hurry, we put the money up, we being the family foundation and whatnot, in the early days.
Then when it began to develop and it could be seen to be something that just might work, a lot of people began to help, and we bought this golf club and fixed it up, and major corporations around the country, that's what we sought, not just here locally, but GE, American Express, IBM, whatnot, to come contribute $200,000 each, and if you contribute $200,000 each, you'll be strongly considered for membership for a $50,000 initiation fee (laughter). There's an IRS reason to put it that way.
But they donated $200,000 each to a community public foundation audited by PriceWaterhouse, whatever it is, so that source has provided $18 or $19 million. The family foundation, actually the family, has put up a good bit more than that. But how can it be done in other cities without all that money?
Now, given the opportunity we could prove that it would be cost effective if all that money was put up by the city, county or government, but it's not necessary, and let me tell you why. The biggest cost we have here actually was the buying and the restoration of this golf club. This golf club has really little to do with what's over there, little to do with what's over there because this is a private club; the neighbors don't belong.
What this club will do is any dime it makes is going back into the community. That's why THE TOUR Championship is so important to us. Now that it's permanent, but I think this is going to get to be an extremely desirable and publicly-attended event. You remember I said that. Two or three years I think they'll be scalping tickets. Atlanta, you could build a steeplechase. Ninety percent of the people there have never been on a horse, but it's packed, because it's an event. Well, this is going to be an event, and it's going to be a good one.
I get long-winded, and I told Fuhrman earlier, as I've gotten longer of tooth I've gotten longer winded. I don't know how to speak in quick sound bytes. This is being done now for instance in Memphis, and it's not around golf; it's around music. Two guys here, started this, and they've gone back and they've restored the old Stax Theater. That was soul music. They've built a school of music and it's right in the middle of the slum. It wasn't as bad as East Lake, but it's a bad one, and if you're ever there, it's worth a trip. They built a museum and the school of music. Kids, instead of coming to learn to play golf like they do with us, they come to learn how to play a musical instrument. But it has provided the spark to renew that area, and there are some others I could tell you about.
You don't need to build a public golf course. That was another very expensive thing that we did. We got the idea of Golf Academy from the Chicago Rodriguez Foundation down in Clearwater. I don't know if y'all have seen that. They started a junior golf academy, and it was so important to the city, the city gave them a public golf course. Well, I don't know if you have to give them one, but every city has got a public golf course, and you can say we want two hours on the back nine every day for Junior Golf Academy. We'll take kids off the street, teach them the wonders of golf and all the good things that happen with golf. Then you don't have to buy one, you don't have to build one in other words, and now there's a federal program implemented that did not exist when we started a program called Hope 6 where the Federal Government will put up the money to tear down that public housing project and provide the money to build back the public housing part of it.
I don't know if there are a lot of first-time things we did, but we also learned from looking at what had worked in part in other places. But if it's just a golf academy, that's like if it was just a house. That's a piece of the puzzle. It needs the total thing.
The Federal Government provides money to tear down. For your market-rate units, we have mixed income. We put a welfare family in one, and then on both sides -- in apartments on both sides, we put market-rate or working families. They become role models for these kids. They want to know how did you get every other one to move out there? These are people that have a need to serve, to do something. They could have joined the Peace Corp but they didn't, and in a lot of cases it's people looking for somewhere they can do something, becoming a big brother or big sister. There's plenty of money to build those apartments from the Federal Government and private sources. You don't have to build a golf course. You shouldn't have to build a school. Taxpayers provide money to build schools and they just run them lousy. We hope to have an impact on that.
These kids' performance were the lowest of the low, and they're moving up and it's going to be a real source of embarrassment for public education. Sorry, I promised not to be that long-winded.
I thank you very much for listening. I hope some of you are curious enough to let us give you a tour across the street.
End of FastScripts.
