Tom Cousins, a legendary Atlanta real estate tycoon, philanthropist and political influencer whose fingerprints can be found from the city’s tallest building to the compassionate redevelopment of one of its toughest intown neighborhoods, has died.
Cousins, who was 93, started his real estate career selling $11,000 houses with his father in the late 1950s and became one of the most influential business leaders in metro Atlanta for decades. He brought professional basketball and hockey franchises to the city, donated land the Georgia World Congress Center sits on and dramatically changed — and raised — the metro skyline. His company expanded to Sunbelt cities spread between Atlanta and Phoenix, Arizona, controlling more than 21 million square feet of high-end space by mid-2025.
His most prominent contribution to Atlanta arguably is Peachtree Street’s red granite Bank of America Plaza. Reaching a height of 1,123 feet, it was the tallest American building outside New York or Chicago at the time of its construction.
Cousins also played a key role in politics, financing and advising elected officials from the Governor’s Mansion to the Gold Dome and Atlanta City Hall. He was an early supporter of Atlanta’s former Mayor Shirley Franklin and a co-chair of her first mayoral campaign in 2001.
“Tom displayed no fear of innovation, new ideas or change,” Franklin said. “For over five decades, his bold vision combined with his creativity, business skills and persistence made the improbable possible time after time in Atlanta.”
Cousins died Tuesday after being hospitalized in Florida, a person close to the family confirmed.
Credit: COPY
Credit: COPY
Cousins was chief executive officer of Cousins Properties until 2002 and chairman until December 2006.
“Tom Cousins, our visionary founder, not only shaped the Atlanta skyline — he shaped lives,” the company said in a statement. “Tom’s impact reached far beyond the buildings he developed.”
His impact on the city was “immeasurable,” both as a developer and a community leader, said A.J. Robinson, chief executive of Central Atlanta Progress, the influential downtown business coalition.
“He was one of the few important pillars the entire community has been built upon in the last 40 years,” Robinson said. Without him, downtown and the community at large “would have been a very, very different place,” he said.
And yet, said his friend Billy Payne in 2006, Cousins’ greatest legacy lies in another arena entirely: friendship.
“Tom’s most significant contribution to Atlanta would be that … he’s been the shining example that kindness to others, great business intellect, love for his community and faith in his Lord can inspire the generations that follow him,” said Payne, the organizer of the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games and a one-time director of Cousins Properties.
Credit: Jason Getz / AJC
Credit: Jason Getz / AJC
Thomas G. Cousins was born Dec. 7, 1931, in Atlanta. The family had modest means and moved often to follow the business of his father, Isaac W. “Ike” Cousins, an auto distributor for General Motors.
Tom started mowing neighbors’ yards in grade school and later delivered newspapers and orders from a pharmacy.
Cousins attended high schools in Decatur and Rome, graduating in 1948 and entering the University of Georgia at age 16. He graduated in the top 10% of his class in 1952 with a degree in finance. After college, he rose to first lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force.
Following his military service, he worked with a Thomson, Georgia, company that sold kits of building materials to home builders. He rose fast, learned the basics of land development and struck out on his own in 1958. By the 1960s, Cousins, then in his 30s, was the largest home builder in Georgia. He took his company public in 1962 and, three years later, turned to office development, which became his hallmark. His first office project, the Piedmont-Cain Building, opened downtown in 1965.
Credit: AJC file
Credit: AJC file
By 1966, Cousins had begun buying old properties as well as the air rights above them in the area known as the Gulch. It included parcels that became the Five Points MARTA station, the Georgia World Congress Center and the Omni arena, which Cousins built as a home for his pro basketball and hockey teams.
Cousins and former Gov. Carl Sanders, a partner in law firm Troutman Sanders (now called Troutman Pepper), bought the St. Louis Hawks on May 2, 1968, for more than $2 million, bringing the NBA to the Deep South for the first time. In 1972, he bought an expansion franchise from the National Hockey League, naming the team the Flames.
His Omni International Hotel, the complex that would eventually become the CNN Center, came in 1976.
The foresight to stitch together the Gulch and its air rights eventually led Los Angeles developer CIM Group to launch the $5 billion Centennial Yards project, which is under construction and promises to remake downtown for the next generation.
During his career, Cousins engaged in an often behind-the-scenes rivalry with another renowned Atlanta developer, John C. Portman Jr. — the developer of the Westin Peachtree Plaza, Peachtree Center, AmericasMart complex and what is now known as Truist Plaza.
Both wanted to be the dominant player downtown and strove to pull the core of the district toward their projects, reshaping the city in the process.
Cousins sold his Omni International Hotel complex to Ted Turner in 1986. He renamed it CNN Center. It served for decades as one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks before CNN vacated the building in early 2024. The complex is now being redeveloped as The Center.
Cousins’ stint as a sports team owner fizzled. He lost millions and sold the Hawks to Turner in 1977 and the Flames to a Canadian investor in 1980. The Flames later relocated to Calgary.
Cousins, like Atlanta, had a better run in the 1980s and 1990s, when he made his greatest impact on Atlanta’s skyline and social fabric.
In 1987, he converted his company to a real estate investment trust and opened Wildwood Office Park, a landmark complex in the woods along the Chattahoochee River. The following year, he announced plans for the twin-crowned 191 Peachtree Tower, a 50-story building by architect Philip Johnson that became one of downtown’s signature skyscrapers. Days later, rival Portman announced his 60-story SunTrust Plaza, now known as Truist Plaza.
In 1989, Cousins revealed what would be his highest achievement in real estate: a new skyscraper for hometown Citizens and Southern National Bank (locally known as C&S) that would be the tallest building in the South.
C&S Chairman Bennett Brown called the $200 million building that would later be renamed Bank of America Plaza “not just a statement, but a proclamation … of boldness, of optimism” about the bank and the city.
Credit: Courtesy CP Group
Credit: Courtesy CP Group
Through multiple mergers and acquisitions in the late 2010s, Cousins Properties emerged as one of the largest office landlords in the Sunbelt. It owns the largest office portfolio in Atlanta, with its current leadership bullish on the city its founder helped build.
Cousins was equally known for his work at the East Lake Meadows housing project, then known as “Little Vietnam.” Between 1987 and 1996, the 54-acre housing project averaged three homicides a year and hundreds of assaults and robberies.
Cousins’ involvement with the housing project started in 1993, when he heard the once grand East Lake Country Club, the home golf course of golf legend Bobby Jones, was on the auction block.
“One of the bidders was a junkyard,” Cousins told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, what else could happen out here?’ It was one thing to have a defunct golf course over there. But a junkyard?”
He bought the club and began restoring it. Across the street was East Lake Meadows, and Cousins soon turned his attention from restoring a golf course to reenergizing the neighborhood.
He teamed up with Renee Glover, then head of the Atlanta Housing Authority, to pool $33.5 million in federal money with corporate donations recruited by Cousins (much of it from memberships at the golf club) to raze the housing project and build mixed-income housing, an elementary school and a YMCA. Cousins also organized local churches to send members to help former housing project residents. By 2002, drug arrests at East Lake had dwindled, and the murder rate had dropped to zero.
“You don’t change a community just by building nice houses,” Cousins told Fortune magazine in 2001. “You have to provide people with a new way of life.”
Professional tournaments at East Lake would become fixtures in the PGA Tour’s annual playoffs.
The East Lake Meadows redevelopment effort, meanwhile, led to the founding of Purpose Built Communities, a nonprofit that helps redevelop low-income areas across the country.
“My big passion at the moment: There is a solution to poverty,” he told the AJC in 2013.
“I know what you’re thinking — B.S. But I can show you. You can’t show me where we can’t. You can’t say it’s preposterous. It’s happened here, and it needs to happen across the country.”
Carol Naughton, CEO of Purpose Built Communities, said the organization’s mission is born out of Cousins outlook that tenacity exists everywhere. It just needs opportunity.
“I was so impressed with his fundamental belief that people were strong and resilient,” Naughton said. “And yet the conditions in which they were living made it hard for them to participate in the American dream and have the same opportunities that Tom had enjoyed.”
After retiring, Cousins spent much of his time in Florida and North Carolina.
Cousins gave away part of his fortune, supporting through his foundation the University of Georgia and Auburn, Emory and Georgia State universities as well as the High Museum of Art, Oakland Cemetery and Presbyterian churches, among others. He also was one of many high-profile donors who contributed $32 million to secure the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal papers for the city.
He and close confidant Larry Gellerstedt Jr. also co-founded the Georgia Research Alliance, a nonprofit that has attracted billions in grants and capital investment for higher education.
“A lot of visionaries can’t convert their visions to reality,” said Gellerstedt’s son Larry Gellerstedt III, also a former CEO of Cousins Properties. “Tom had a remarkable ability to do that.”
Cousins is survived by his wife Ann Cousins; two of their children, Grady Cousins and Lillian Giornelli, the latter a director of Cousins Properties; and several grandchildren. A third child, Caroline, died in 1999.
Details about funeral arrangements were not immediately known.
— Editor’s note: This story has been updated with additional comments and to correct a building material used in Bank of America Plaza.
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