Tom Cousins

Cousins graduated with a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) in 1952 from the Terry College of Business at The University of Georgia in Athens. He and his father started their real-estate company in 1958. During the 1960s, Tom Cousins moved from real-estate to property development and sports franchising.

He developed buildings such as the CNN Center, the Omni Coliseum, 191 Peachtree Tower, the Pinnacle Building in Buckhead and the first phase of the Georgia World Congress Center. He and competitor John Portman completely remade downtown Atlanta in the 1970s and 1980s.

He also helped revive and redesign the home course of golfing great Bobby Jones, East Lake Golf Club, which had fallen into disrepair. He hired Rees Jones (the son of legendary golf course designer Robert Trent Jones) to redesign the golf course, which has since hosted the PGA Tour's season ending Tour Championship several times, and become one of the leading golf courses in Atlanta. Cousins and his family financed the project to the tune of about $25 million. This was part of a greater revitalization of the East Lake Meadows housing project in the East Lake neighborhood around the golf course.

He retained air rights over the CNN Center parking deck in Atlanta's massive railroad gulch.

He stepped down as head of Cousins Properties in January 2002.

In 1995 Cousins founded the East Lake Foundation in Atlanta. The Foundation partnered with the Atlanta Housing Authority to build a mixed-income apartment block in a local low-income area with a high crime rate and put additional resources into education options and job provision for the tenants. Columnist Leonard Pitts Jnr. noted that these changes saw "violent crime down 96 percent" and "78 percent of kids passing the state math test when only 5 percent could do it before".

Based on the results of the East Lake Foundation project, Cousins, with partner Warren Buffett, created Purpose Built Communities, an organization focused on supporting other communities working to replicate the successful community development seen in Atlanta. Purpose Built Communities partners with many communities across the United States.