This article and this thread are written with comments with an air of awe and inspiration at The Masters. It's a sentiment held by tourists and rich people in Augusta. That's not reality.
> Dickson watched the Masters purchase and raze her childhood friends’ entire neighborhood to build a parking lot. “Then five years ago they bought another whole apartment complex, tore it down, and put up another parking lot,”
Yeah that's kind of the tip of the iceberg here.
I was born and raised in that apartment complex. It's a field now. Everyone in that neighborhood knew that The Masters is a force of nature with more money than God. At 6 years old I knew they'd eventually bulldoze the whole neighborhood, including the apartment complex, the Food Lion, the IHOP, the steakhouse, the various strip malls in-between the large oddly-run church who named their strip mall "The Masters' Plaza" (who, at some point got into a legal battle with The Masters and won). The article makes it seem like some kind of surprise that these events happened, but this was par for the course (har har) for The Masters behavior. They'd quietly bought up adjacent properties for years and years and do nothing with them, allowing time to slowly erode the people they'd push out in the process, in the name of their golf club.
That apartment complex was a hive of poor and working class people. It was ~85% Black American, old people on welfare, and mentally disabled people. People who worked as security guards, nurses, truckers, at restaurants and small businesses and more. It was definitely full of crime, and a good place to get drugs, and had some nearby geography (woods and cliffs) on the back of the property that made it easy to hide illegal activity. The property itself was not profitable for any company that owned it as far as I'm aware, until they sold it to the next owner. It was a ponzi scheme of sorts. Growing up there, the name of the complex changed a half-dozen times, from San Susi, to Oak Park, and so on. Each time they'd try to theme the apartment complex, like some kind of hand-me-down amusement park. The original design had "S" as the divider line in all the sidewalks. Then the next iteration they planted oak trees everywhere. Finally during the third major iteration, they moved the main leasing office from a humble repurposed apartment and built a fucking mansion of a building. I heard it cost millions to build. Keep in mind this is a place where a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom apartment costs $400 a month. I think when they built that new leasing office that pissed a lot of people off. Eventually, an iteration or two later, they built fences around the entire major part of the property, which brought the crime elements down a bit. They added a security gate and a guard out front. Eventually, they sold the field at the front of the property to The Masters. They had already allowed The Masters to park cars there for a few years already, so why not?
My point being, this place had history. There were residents who'd never move out on their own. There were some residents so old, or disabled, or on social services that they'd never be able to move anywhere else unless forced. There were people who were born there and lived their entire life there in their 20s and 30s. I wasn't there for when they condemned the property but I can only imagine the absolute nightmare that it caused.
What the folks at The Masters did was disassemble the neighborhood piece by piece. When they saw weakness, they'd buy a small piece of land for cheap and add it to their collection. After all, they have time on their side.
How do you buy an apartment complex for cheap? You make it worth less by getting rid of the support services nearby. You get rid of the grocery store that people could walk to in order to buy their groceries because they were too poor to own a car. You buy the nearby church. You buy the IHOP. You buy the small businesses and you strong arm them out. The camera repairshop, the music business, the barber. And when you do, you don't put anything there. Maybe some grass. Some trees, after a while. Take down the signs, leave the structure. They even managed to close a major road (Old Berckmans Road) and buy a whole set of houses. After a while you end up with this eerie amusement park feeling. Where there used to be a neighborhood, now there's this shell of a landscape, this amusement park for rich people to play golf.
Of course, there's a different set of rules for the rich. There's a Windsor Jewelers that opened a lavish storefront right across from The Masters years ago. Now how does that happen? A piece of land in front of The Masters is for sale and they don't buy it? It doesn't turn into a piece of grassland? Of course, the real story is that the owner is a friend of the owners of The Masters, who also owns a space downtown where he keeps his fancy car collection, and has an apartment-hotel of sorts that he rents out to fancy visitors during the tournament, and for events, weddings, and so on. But that business won't ever be threatened.
The article reads just like I'd expect it to read. It's about this strange story about a piece of amusement park food for rich people. All these people and their lives in the shadow of this rich man's amusement park are just a footnote. "Oh yeah, and then they moved the poors out to make more trees, and eventually they made a hotel that's occupied for only 2 weeks out of the year".
So glad I managed to escape "disgusta" Georgia many years ago. If I never go back it'd be too soon.