While neighborhood redevelopment always has some downside, I have to throw strong support behind the work Tom Cousins has done with East Lake and the surrounding neighborhood.
I moved to Atlanta in 1976 out of college. At the time, there were very few quality, reasonably affordable courses available….. Most of my friends lived in or near Buckhead so Atlanta Athletic Club and Chris Cupit’s Rivermont seemed impossibly distant. Peachtree was an impossible dream, and Dunwoody and Druid Hills just didn’t seem to “fit.” Fortunately, first Cherokee then Capital City and Atlanta Country Club introduced very attractive intermediate memberships which, though still fairly expensive, were achievable for those of us lucky to have good jobs and who wished to make it a priority. At that time, East Lake was the option of choice for those who couldn’t quite afford one of the nicer full service clubs, but were looking for a good golf course.
I had a number of friends at East Lake in those years; our standing joke was that an assessment was expected any year to cover the needed machine gun emplacements surrounding the course. Two friends were mugged while playing golf, one of them twice. It wasn’t uncommon to hear gunfire while playing, and one simply ignored the drunk/stoned roamers. Even in the relative isolation of the golf course, the area was frightening.
Addressing all the social problems of all the neighborhood at the time was, frankly, far beyond the resources of the city of Atlanta. Their “solution” was to close and demolish the 650+ public housing units. Tom Cousins, who purchased the golf course around this time, stepped in and took control of the redevelopment (I’m sure largely to influence/control the nature of it). With a mix of affordable residences, though, it seems a resounding success. Given how bad the situation was previously, I see no way it could have been successful without displacing a large portion of the original population.
Jamey