The Intrada Westside apartment complex in northwest Atlanta takes its name from a classical music term for an interlude. But the affordable housing complex applauded for “showcasing the power of community” owes its existence to a very different kind of music.
The $37 million, 143-unit center, which opened last year, came into being in large part through the efforts of former area resident Clifford “T.I.” Harris. The project was the latest and largest-to-date philanthropic initiative by the Atlanta trap rapper, actor and entrepreneur described as not just “an undisputed music icon, but an active and vocal community leader” (Atlanta News First).
Monthly rents for the one- to three-bedroom apartments range from $800 to $2,000. There are community gardens and plans for a grocery and pharmacy on the ground floor. In addition, there are 25 special units for homeless young people. “There’s a lot of . . . teenage homelessness that plagues the city,” T.I. tells WayMaker Journal in a conversation about his efforts to improve things in the area he once called home, “so we just tried to kill as many birds [as possible] with the stone that we had.”
T.I. has come a long way since growing up on the streets near Intrada Westside. He has made a name for himself as a Grammy-winning (including one for 2006’s “What You Know,” best rap solo performance), chart-topping artist and trap music pioneer and appeared in blockbuster movies and popular television shows. Business successes have included music (a label), fashion and real estate developments. In 2019, he was honored with the inaugural American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Voice of the Culture Award for his major influence on music and culture.
Intrada Westside was born out of his property interests, when he realized he could “do good and do well at the same time.” Invited to be part of then-Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ transition team, he was shocked to learn that 90% of people who worked in Atlanta couldn’t afford to live in the city. “This was a time where they were tearing down the projects and people were kind of pushed outside of the city to other areas where they were no longer a part of the community that they once made valuable,” says T.I. Meanwhile, one of the parcels of land he had acquired was in Bankhead.
He had plans to gut the former KMart building there and turn it into an entertainment complex. But hearing about the city’s housing needs “just kind of shifted my thoughts and my ambitions . . . I just kind of figured that an affordable housing complex would benefit the city greater than another entertainment complex—bowling, skating, dancing, and drinking.”
The Intrada Westside apartment complex development he spearheaded is intended to create an “oasis of opportunity for affordable housing that didn’t exist,” says T.I.
Bringing the vision to life was a major undertaking that involved public and private funds and multiple players, including city, state and federal leaders. “It was quite a complex capital stack,” says T.I. “I couldn’t have done it by myself; so many people came to the table . . . so many of us that all just had a mutual interest in creating this oasis of opportunity for affordable housing that didn’t exist in the city.”
Last December’s ribbon-cutting ceremony symbolized “a brighter future for the residents of the Grove Park neighborhood, showcasing the power of community, affordable housing, and supportive services,” Atlanta Housing’s then-chief operating officer (now president and CEO) Terri Lee said at the ceremony.
As widely applauded as the Intrada Westside development has been, T.I. is wary about seeming to speak too authoritatively about how to make a difference in the community. “Honestly, I don’t feel I’m in a position to direct anybody in any specific way of doing things,” he says. “I just move based on my spirit, when I feel something is the right thing to do and I’m able to do it. There are a lot of things that I would like to do that I’m not in a position to do just as of yet. So I’ve got to wait.”
He does have one piece of advice, though, born out of his experience. “For those who want to do [something] but feel like they too busy, don’t worry about what you can’t do. Just focus on the things that you can do. Everybody can do something, so focus on what you can do instead of focusing on the things you can’t do.”
Following a voice
T.I. is cautious about attributing a source to those nudges he gets. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s subconscious and it’s incoherent. Sometimes I just act without thinking . . . And that works to my benefit and detriment at some time . . . I just try to move when I am spoken to.”
Returning to all this later in the interview, T.I. says he thinks of himself as “just a vessel, you know? I think the glory goes to God. I’m just an instrument being used to carry out the will, and I’m blessed to be able to do so and hope to continue to do it for as long as my purpose allows.”
Whatever the source of the inner prompting T.I. follows, he has had an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time.
He came to the aid of Scott Stapp, the singer in hard rock band Creed, when Stapp was badly injured in a fall from his room balcony at a Miami hotel in 2006—an incident Stapp has described varyingly as a suicide attempt and an accident.
T.I. and a friend came across Stapp as he lay on the balcony above them. “He was trying to get up and jump again,” T.I. recalls. “He was trying to say something about something going on in his life with his significant other, and he thought that she was in another room with somebody. And I was like, ‘Bruh, you need to chill. Just hold up, man.’”
T.I. and his friend kept talking to the injured singer, “just trying to just keep him calm and just telling him it can’t be that bad. We ended up convincing him to allow us to call somebody up to help him down. He was still trying to jump down, but he had done broke his leg or something, so he couldn’t really move . . . He allowed us to call for help for him. They got him down, got him some help.”
T.I. had forgotten about the incident until Stapp later wrote about it in a book, calling T.I. his guardian angel. To that point, T.I. hadn’t realized who he was helping. “I knew of the group, but I wasn’t like a fan to the point where I would know the lead singer, you know what I mean?” T.I. says. “I was just happy to be in the right place at the right time to be able to do that.”
That memory prompts another one, of when he was driving in rush hour traffic in Los Angeles’ Crenshaw district. A car ran a red light and hit the vehicle in front of him, which was flipped onto its side. T.I. pulled over and joined some others to help the driver out of the car through the passenger window.
RELATED: Former Black Panther Leader Secures $80M for Oakland Affordable Housing
“First thing, she looked and said, ‘T.I.! I ain’t got no drawers on,’” he recounts with a chuckle. “I said, ‘Come on, man,’ and we pulled her out. She said, ‘Is that T.I. for real?’ And I got in the car and got the hell on.”
Once, that distinct inner voice even prompted T.I. to actually step into a crisis situation, not just respond to finding himself caught up in one. He was listening to Atlanta’s V-103 radio station as he drove when host Ryan Cameron announced they were pausing the broadcast because someone was threatening to jump off the top of the station building.
“I was like, dang. And I was already headed downtown. Something just said, ‘Go. Just go help.’ I’m like, ‘Man, what am I gonna do? How in the hell I’m gonna help?’ And they said, ‘Just go.’ And I’m like, ‘Man, all right, cool.’”
Parking as close as he could to the building, which had been cordoned off, he went over to one of the police officers and offered to talk to the man in trouble to see if he could coax him down from his perch. He recorded a video message telling the man he wanted to help. “They said that if that don’t work, then we’ll take you up there.”
When 10 minutes or so had gone by without a response, T.I. started heading up to speak to the man in person. “And then, when we got to the elevator, he was coming down right when we got there. He had come down after they showed him the video . . .”
Leading by example
Intrada Westside is part of a helping-hand attitude ingrained in T.I. from a young age. “When the resources didn’t come from the school or from the conventional methods, they came from the people who had an excess of abundance,” he remembers. “Which were usually drug dealers, [or] other entrepreneurs in the community,” he notes.
As his career took off, he knew he wanted to be part of paying it back; he just wasn’t sure what that would look like. It started small, a holiday food giveaway that over the past near-decade has become a much-appreciated community fixture. Together with some friends he would load up a U-Haul with turkeys and groceries and go and hand them out around the projects. “We were just doing what we could. It wasn’t organized. We had no donations from sponsors.” Those efforts led to the 2019 founding of his Harris Community Works charity.
From what he has learned through his involvement in the Intrada Westside housing project, he offers this to would-be helpers: you have to care enough about making a difference to hang in there. “Because it’s gonna take some sacrifice,” he says. “It’s gonna take a lot of patience, and it’s going to take a lot of collaboration and working together with others that may have strengths that differ from yours. And that takes humility, because everybody who’s able can do things on their own, but will they find the value in doing things with others?”
Family is important to T.I., an emphasis born out of his experiences growing up as a single child raised largely by his grandparents. “I really just tried to put the things in place in my life that I felt were missing when I was a kid,” he explains. He is grateful for the care he got, “but everybody was real focused on paying bills and the like. There was not a real presence, and [not] a lot of communication.
“Everybody who had issues kind of had their own issues and dealt with them individually and learned how to get over them and got through them and was strong enough to fight through them and make it to the next issue. So I try to be something different for my family, or I try to represent something different with my family than I was able to have available to me.”
T.I.’s family has been involved in his holiday giveaways and he hopes they will follow their own paths for giving back. “You lead by example, and you can kind of exemplify the sort of behavior you’d like to see in your children, and you hope that it’s replicated and it’s continued throughout generations,” he says. “I also hope that they find their own ways to make an impact, their own ways that they like to give and be of service to the community, and that we add on to what I started with, the things that they intend to start.”
He mentions daughter Deyjah’s interest in mental health issues. “She hopes to spread that message and help people through meditation, prayer and other holistic methods,” he says. “That’s her passion and she’s received significant benefit from the practices herself. Her wanting to share that with others, that’s something that will add on to what we’re doing.”
To what does T.I. attribute his success across so many different sectors, from music and movies to community change? “Having morals, principles that I maintain regardless of the circumstances. Whether it’s to my benefit or my detriment at the time, honestly, I treat people how I want to be treated,” he answers. “I do what I say. I treat people how I want to be treated. I think that separates me from most others.”
From an interview with Louis Carr
