New Discoveries Related to An Excursion 26 Years Ago

It crossed my mind recently as I commuted the short distance from a lakeside retreat in northeastern Person County back down to Durham, NC which has been my home since 1989, that it was horses and a good steak that caused me to first make the journey up there 26 years ago.

I wanted to see a pasture full of Percheron, a breed of draft horses.  Back then these teams spent a good deal of time on the road, pulling an old 1900s farm wagon through small town parades on behalf of Southern States, a farmer’s coop.

By the time I was born, a fifth generation Idaho horse and beef cattle rancher, the bottom was falling out of the market for horses.

When my great grandparents had homesteaded and assembled that spread along the Henry’s Fork in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, there were more than 22 million horses in the United States.

By the time I came along four decades later the number had dropped from nearly 12 million at the end of World War II to just 7.6 million in the late 1940’s.  By the time I turned 12 years old there were barely 3 million nationwide including our three working saddle horses.

My paternal grandfather who had bred and trained draft horses back when there was a market for them also had a reputation earned as a trainer for saddle horses.

He kept three teams of draft animals for nostalgia while I was coming up playing among them and my favorite had been a beautiful, black and gray speckled, purebred Percheron named Dolly.

By the time I arrived in Durham in mid-1989, recruited to establish my fifth community destination marketing startup (two from scratch) in my now long concluded career, the community was already well on its way to earning a national reputation for great restaurants.

In fact, most people where were here by then agree with Dr. Nathan Vandergrift, the head of Duke University’s Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Center, who once noted regarding that era”:

"…what's put Durham back on track is food…"

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble but Durham’s re-emergence including the resurrection of Downtown began in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

My subsequent arrival and the founding of DCVB to distill Durham’s personality and manage the community’s reputation as well as foster and leverage Durham’s sense of place, including its food scene, into demand-side economic development certainly played a role.

But revitalization was firmly underway more than two decades before the founding of Downtown Durham Inc. to champion the supply-side and three decades before tax incentives spawned newer developments often credited today.

I definitely wasn’t the second coming for Durham, nor was anyone who followed.  That designation belongs to sense of place preservationists including the late 1970s DNA that spawned its reputation for great chefs.

So what was I doing at a steak place clear up in Person County so soon after my arrival?  Northern Durham County and much of adjacent Person County remind me of my rural roots.

Anywhere I’ve lived, it is settings such as this that still ground me when I gravitate to them.  It may be why I am also so intrigued by Person County’s Sunset Ridge Buffalo Farm and the fact that as late as 1728, Buffalo still inhabited the bottoms of what is today’s Hyco Lake. across the from our retreat on Lake Mayo.

On the way back from seeing those Percheron back in 1990, we stopped at a restaurant in outer Timberlake that had been opened by the Cash’s three years earlier now called the Homestead Steakhouse and Country Store, one of two notable steakhouses in Person County.

By the time I arrived or soon after, the Cash’s had also opened a great breakfast diner I frequented in uptown Roxboro called Farmers Supply which, unfortunately, a subsequent owner took under by not remitting sales taxes.

Our lakeside retreat is in Holloway Township but it is within a nice drive through countryside to Roxboro, a town of between 8,000 and 9,000 or a fifth of  Person County’s population.

Yanni, a chef-friend of ours in Durham recently put us onto a great new restaurant up in little ‘ole Roxboro named Brookland Eats.

It was recently founded by two Northern Durham High School classmates after returning to North Carolina, one with roots up there, who opened in a restaurant space in a restored 113-year-old building at the intersection of Old Durham and Allensville roads.

They lured a well-known chef with them back to his native Person County.

Technically, Brookland Eats is in Brooksdale, a township of Person County that is incorporated into the Roxboro town limits.  The old building used to be a Fox & Co. general merchandise store back in the day.

The proprietor, G.M. Fox, married a Brooks, the family for whom the now neighborhood is named.  The name Brookland Eats is a nod to Brooksdale I suspect and sense of place.

Good restaurants understand the monetary value of accenting authentic sense of place.

Designations, including postal and statutory, but not authentic sense of place.

More in the next post on the earlier DNA of Durham’s 1980s era culinary reputation that is so evident in its chef driven restaurants of today.

The Origin of Poverty and Our Biases Today

The four-county area centered around Durham, where I live, along with Chapel Hill, North Carolina is possibly the most highly acclaimed in the nation when you take into the breadth of the accolades it has earned as an MSA and those of its individual cities.

It also has the distinction of being the 20th MSA with the widest gap between rich and poor, according to the blog 24/7 Wall St.  The wealthiest half of households earn more than half (53.5%) of all income earned here while the poorest 20% earn just 3%.

The wealthiest 5% have one of the highest household incomes in the nation for that percentile.

In the book I mentioned yesterday about the history of capital and related inequality, French economist Thomas Piketty notes that worldwide, the poorest half of the population still owns nothing, while the middle class now owns between a quarter and a third of total wealth.

He continues to explain that “the wealthiest 10% now own two-thirds of what there is to own.”  Apparently, it was even worse a century ago.  Anyone interested in closing this gap needs to read Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

It may not sound like a page-turner but it is.  In a very easy to understand way, Dr. Piketty weaves historical events and data with paradigm shifts.

In part, income equality is rooted in the shift from land to things like profits, dividends, interest, rents.

In other words, income generated from capital and what Piketty calls “the  long-term evolution of the relative roles of inheritance and savings in capital formation.”

When inheritance rather than work and savings begins to predominate, “the past tends to devour the future.”

I’ve written before that Durham’s poverty rate took root in the late 1940s and early 1950s when the number of jobs plateaued but the community continued its rapid growth, in large part, due to it historical role as a magnet for those looking for work.

This was also a period when Durham economy began to rapidly transform from tobacco and textile manufacturing to education, research and development and high tech industries.

Despite efforts to re-educate the workforce, many who had come here for blue collar work and failing to see the paradigm shift, merely went home and waited for the next call-back to the factories as they had done for generations during layoffs.

Some have now become disconnected from society altogether while those who did shift gears found primarily low-wage jobs.  By 1960, 1-in-3 Durham County residents lived in poverty as did 40% of North Carolinians overall.

All the while, Durham’s economy skyrocketed but with jobs requiring far more education.  While much lower now than in 1960 when the economic transformation took hold, poverty still haunts nearly one-in-five residents in the City of Durham.

Last year a scientific opinion poll of Americans asked, “When people are poor, do you think that’s more likely to be because they had fewer opportunities or because of individual failings?”

Overall, 30% said “personal failings,” including 17% of Blacks and 30% of Hispanics, as did 48% of Republicans and Conservatives as well as 41% of those with household incomes over $100,000.

But 44% of Americans said “fewer opportunities,” including well more than half of minorities and those making under $40,000 as a household and including 36% of households making $100,000 plus, 28% of Conservatives and 23% of Republicans.

Americans were also asked, “When people are poor, do you think that’s more likely to be because good jobs aren’t available, or because they have a poor work ethic?”

Overall, 28% cited poor work ethic including 21% of Blacks and 33% of Hispanics as well as 49% of Republicans, 44% of Conservatives, 35% of those with household incomes over $100,000 and 24% of those making $40,000 or less.

But 47% of Americans said it is because good jobs weren’t available including 33% of Conservatives, 21% of Republicans and 42% of households making over $100,000.

When asked how some people became wealthy, 52% of Americans chalked it up to having more opportunities compared to 31% who believed they worked harder including 50% of Republicans but only 36% of Conservatives and 33% of those with incomes over $100,000.

Nearly 60% of Republicans believe unemployed people could find jobs if they really wanted to, a view also held by 51% of Conservatives as well as 53% with incomes over $100,000 and 35% of those making less than $40,000.

Interestingly a new study in Germany finds that more-trusting people on average have an increase in income over those who are cynical.

No community that I know of is more determined or does more to eliminate poverty than Durham. Hopefully, this will be useful perspective, both macro and micro, for those on the front lines.

The Overlooked Attribute for Appeal to Creatives

Not only is the term creative class misused, but lost in most analysis of research about this bellwether group is the role of landscape appeal.

It is also another reason why officials in Durham, North Carolina, where I live seem short-sighted to keep skipping over the importance of conducting a thorough community-wide i-Tree inventory of tree canopy.

Researchers now unpack the creative class into three types of knowledge workers by occupation or avocation: synthetic, analytic and symbolic.

Analytic creatives work in universities or research labs and in the R&D divisions of corporations.

Synthetic creatives such as entrepreneurs are those involved in applied research, e.g. taking discoveries or what works in one area and applying it to concrete solutions in another such as with processes or systems.

Symbolic creatives are those in the cultural industries including everything from design and packaging to marketing organizations to curators, artists and musicians.

When communities such as Durham seek to perpetuate appeal to the creative class, they are focusing on the small percentage of individuals who will relocate in a four year span.

Symbolics are the least mobile, while analytics are the most.

According to Dr. Richard Florida, “many confuse creative class with young workers” but age 25 to 35 just happens to be the cohort least rooted.  Even then, rootedness and authenticity, more than “hipness” are the attributes of places to which they are most drawn.

In 2003, the year after first publication of The Rise of the Creative Class, I formed a consortium in Durham, to drill down to the county level, long before data mining made that the gold standard.

We were one of the first in the nation at that level to do so.

But not until digging deeper into the research did I realize until recently that the analysis missed one of the most important attributes to creative class appeal, which is natural setting.

Still, as far as it went, It turned out our hunch was correct.  Durham County and the four-county Durham MSA, now hyphenated to Durham-Chapel Hill were identified as some of the highest concentrations of creative class workers in the nation.

Some people who were too impatient to read the research or the book would leap frenetically in an effort to pigeon hole the create class, jumping to classifying it as only as artists, then ad agencies, then entertainment venues and as some still do now, as entrepreneurs.

Of course, the creative class includes or is drawn to places with those attributes and populations but it is more complicated than that.  For example, the groups including those noted above are far more comprehensive, and sometimes things have different meanings.

For example, by entertainment venues, an active street music scene is far more relevant than large-scale venues, especially those that have high ticket prices and where it is hard to come and go during performances.

Overlooked is that “outdoor amenities” are a key ingredient to places where creatives are drawn and congregate.  “Outdoor” unpacks into landscape, climate and recreational influences.

“Landscape” preferences include forest and open country as well as topographic variation, e.g hills and dales, lakes, rivers and access to mountains and coasts, etc.

The greater forest cover a place has, the higher its appeal.

Anyone truly familiar with Durham can see why it is appealing to and has such a huge creative class sector.

Values such as tolerance (we prefer the word acceptance here,) historic building that are appealing to creative class ventures, organic districts such as Brightleaf and Ninth Street, historic neighborhoods, a world class R&D park and two research university are pivotal.

It has a renowned foodie and cultural scene, a downtown entrepreneurial hub along with a landscape mix of urban, small town and rural as well as waterways, greenways and the 60% of forest canopy remaining as shown in the image above of North Durham.

It is the same mix that visitors find so appealing, including the 80% to 85% of newcomers and relocating executives who scout the community first as visitors.

They may be drawn by the community’s overarching brand (more than a logo or tagline) and the coherent storytelling of its marketing organization but only because Durham delivers on that personality.

Officials here have much to worry about including elimination of poverty.

But only by fostering all three elements of Durham’s incredible sense of place, a distinctive cocktail of “built,” cultural and natural assets, can its vitality be ensured so as to generate the resources needed.

Most at risk is its natural setting or landscape because it is the most fragile.  It can be so easily cannibalized by the first two place-based ingredients but without it, they are nothing.

1 Corinthians 13:13, adapted to sense of place, would read – And now these three remain: “built,” cultural and natural.  But the greatest of these is “natural.”  Because it is the most fragile.

Place Is More Than A Name Tag

During a witty presentation at a dinner recently, the adaptive-reuse developer of Durham’s historic Lucky Strike factory objected to being called a Raleigh developer, kidding that “I don’t know what I have to do to be a Durham developer.”

He lives in Raleigh where his family has strong generational ties.  Although the email address for his Durham employees and ventures  still says Raleigh, he does have a very valid point.

From now on I, for one, will defend his case and hope that I haven’t offended him in any way.

Being called a Raleigh developer probably began not as a pejorative but when someone tried to distinguish him from indigenous developers with whom he has competed for tenants and resources.

But the fact that he has a Durham base, pays Durham taxes and is proud of his Durham identity is Durham enough for me.  Besides, one of his sons with whom I was an early collaborator on the mammoth project has relocated with his family to Durham.

Drawing interest and investment from outside a community is one part of economic development especially on the premise they will hire local residents and use locally based suppliers.

However, the centerpiece of economic development is always to retain and grow the businesses that are already there in a community, particularly those that are indigenous.

But you know a paradigm has shifted when a developer from a rival community considers that label a pejorative, even in jest, and pleads the case as many do, to be given a Durham identity.

Many in my former field of economic development are betrayed by failing to be loyal to the very community they accept money to promote.  I remember some awkward conversations a decade or more ago in Durham.

I had to gingerly connect the dots for two of my peers in Durham back then that when you take a community’s money to promote its development, embracing the home team comes with the territory.

Here that means Duke, NCCU and the Durham Bulls regardless of your personal preferences.

At the very least, you are honor bound not to make life difficult for local teams by being distracted with personal connections elsewhere or trying to do a favor for neighboring colleagues. That is the job of economic developers in those communities.

These two peers dug an even deeper hole by trying to justify their allegiance to the Raleigh newspaper because the Durham paper had been bought by a company based in Kentucky.  The room grew quiet when I pointed out that the Raleigh paper was owned by a California company.

The term “local” refers not only to growing indigenous businesses, but to those who invest in facilities based in Durham and pay local Durham taxes.

When you represent a community, it is important to fully embrace it, not just when it is convenient.  That includes modifying previously-held personal preferences and alumni allegiances.

Too many in my former field of community marketing as well as other types of organizations in development come off as generic hired guns because they always seem more attached to their field of work than to the communities they serve.

They are easily betrayed when what they do seems “plug and play” and allegiance is paid to powerful interests over local stakeholders.  They always seem more focused on where they will land next or the next rung on the ladder than on the job at hand.

Because their focus is blurred, many are also ethically-challenged.

Part of my job before I retired was advising relocating or expanding businesses on how to become “Durhamized.”  I was pretty good at it, but gladly left that responsibility to my even more capable successor many years ago.

As local officials often tell me, I’ve done a very good job of retiring.

Tracing Partisanship

Moderates are nearly extinct in the Republican Party.  In an interview today (28.25 mark) on the Diane Rehm Show, Olympia Snowe, a Republican moderate who has just retired from the U.S. Senate seemed to date the divide only to President Obama’s administration.

But a recently published study shows that the partisanship that gridlocks Congress today actually began during the first President Bush, also a moderate Republican, after gradually growing during the the terms of conservative President Ronald Reagan.

It really picked up steam during the so-called Conservative Republican Revolution of 1994 and its subsequent attempt to remove from office a moderate-Democrat, President Bill Clinton.

Present-day partisanship reached its zenith under the second President Bush, a conservative, and has actually moderated under President Obama, considered a liberal but who by many measures has actually governed more from the center.

My take comes from an analysis that was mapped senator by senator, session by session from 1975 through 2012 by two researchers. One is Dr. James Moody a sociology researcher and leader of the Duke Network Analysis Center here in Durham, North Carolina.

He teamed up with research mathematician Dr. Peter Mucha at the main campus of the University of North Carolina, several miles south in Chapel Hill, North Carolina which is part of the same metro area north and east of one centered around North Carolina’s capital city, Raleigh (just to be non-partsian.)

To my eye, the analysis, published last month, also appears to reveal that while endangered, moderate Republicans as of 2012 may even be more apparent today than moderate Democrats, a party home to a far greater proportion of moderate voters.

The mapping also seems to reveal that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was far more divisive than the 2010 overhaul of healthcare.  It also shows that during the prior event Congress was more polarized than a previous high in 1910 but fell below that benchmark during and after the latter.

It also revealed to me more about the relatively new discipline of network science which cuts across social and physical sciences to study relationships and interactions in areas like health, culture, organizations, science and politics.

Maybe it just because I am a moderate, independent of either political party, but this statistical and behavioral analysis has certainly given me a much better appreciation of the depth and breadth of political partisanship.

Calibrating A Foodie Culture

“The average person eats no more than thirty foods on a regular basis,” according to the new book Gulp by Mary Roach.  That is also the number of restaurants I frequent in Durham, North Carolina where I live.

In retirement, I know I eat out too much.  However, Durham’s reputation with foodies was established long before that term was coined and more than thirty years before Southern Living recently crowned us the “The South’s Tastiest Town.”

Durham is no stranger to accolades, even related to its foodie ecosystem, but it didn’t take news reporters here long to turn the newest “feather” into a story about our resurgent Downtown area.

Long before Downtown Durham’s reawakening, the Ninth Street, Rockwood and Brightleaf districts were earning Durham nationwide restaurant accolades.  Even before revitalization efforts were launched, this reputation was spilling over into  the City Center district.

I remember making a bet with a friendly local newspaper reporter over dinner one night in 1995, that Brightleaf was part of Downtown.  He lost the bet but continued to argue that since several other old tobacco factories separated Brightleaf from the center of Downtown back then, it didn’t count.

Now even those historic factories he saw as a demarcation have become repopulated by numerous restaurants, bars, offices, public services, shops and condos.

Today, while fawning over Downtown, news reporters often forget or have no memory that Durham was a thriving restaurant community long before the reawakening of its central business district.

Nor was “zero sum” ever a factor in its long slumber.  Just as American Tobacco is assumed to have spurred Downtown’s current renaissance, it is likely that spillover from districts outside of Downtown deserve some of the credit as well.

A study released this week by the NPD Group found that 42% of diners frequent their favorite restaurants regardless of promotions.  Only 9% “go where it is cheapest while 26% “switch around based on promotions.  Surprising to me was that 19% seldom eat out and 4% rejected any of these choices.

Quality, a combination of food and customer services, is the key driver of restaurant loyalty. An earlier NPD report showed a decrease in deal-driven consumers and that specials offered over a length of time are perceived as regular pricing.

Durham’s appeal as a dining destination was already emerging when the community’s first official destination marketing organization (DMO) was launched two dozen years ago and that reputation was quickly made a promotional centerpiece.

In the last few years though, food-related visitors were made one of a handful of focus areas and the results are clear. Visitors generate a third of foodservice revenue nationwide and the percentage is even higher in destinations such as Durham.

A billion visitors will stay this year in hotels and other lodging properties worldwide.  Nearly four billion will frequent restaurants.

However, the challenge for Downtown and other dining districts is to refocus on helping existing dining establishments become sustainable.  I fear that the “a more the merrier” frenzy fails to grasp how incredibly delicate survival is in the dining business. 

Each year, Nielsen computes a Restaurant Growth Index (RGI.)  The RGI charts restaurant openings and sales by metro area.  Nationwide last year, $472.4 billion in overall restaurant sales declined by $3.8 billion, while new restaurant openings surged by 47,161.

The year before, sales grew by $17.5 billion but the number of restaurants fell by 16,000.  The linkage is undeniable.  Churn is the scourge of a community’s dining reputation.

The four-county metro centered around Durham and including Chapel Hill, also known for its food reputation, is indexed at 109 points.  The higher the score over 100, the better the opportunities for additional restaurants.

“The RGI score is calculated on a metro’s total restaurant sales, sales as a percent of capita income, compared to the nation as a whole.”  If it isn’t, growth in tourism should be factored.

Boone, North Carolina, a tenth the size of the Durham metro but home to the 17,000-student Appalachian State University and one of the nation’s best hospitality degree programs, has an RGI of 460 and ranks 4th in the nation for restaurant opportunities.

In Durham’s cohort, Greensboro-High Point is indexed at 153, Asheville 130, Fayetteville 119, Charlotte-Gastonia 118, Winston-Salem 118, and Raleigh-Cary 112.

While still in positive territory as a location for new restaurants, Durham RGI is lowest among these metro peers, meaning we need to start focusing on making the restaurants we have more sustainable rather than just facilitating more competition, especially from chains.

Visitor-centric economic and cultural development works on the principle of generating “demand” for existing businesses and letting the marketplace determine when more are needed.

Unfortunately, entities involved in traditional economic development, such as chambers and downtown development organizations are more often “supply-driven.”

Focused on new developments, too often these groups can be insensitive or blind to the delicate issues of sustainability in the existing business climate, until it is too late.

Restaurants in particular must be viewed as more than just tangential to development as they were considered by traditional economic developers as recently as the 1990s.

It is also important to protect organic districts from chains.  Unfortunately, this will be put to the test if a new development along Ninth Street includes chain restaurants as rumored.  Hopefully, the developers are aware of what a chain store did to destroy Franklin Street in nearby Chapel Hill.

When making decisions or fostering a business climate communities are well-advised to adopt an index approach, taking the RGI down to the community and district level to ascertain when it is optimal or cannibalistic to grow an industry such as restaurants.

Wherever possible, the index must also factor in visitor and commuter populations to illuminate the sales per capita element.  It must also take into account the research showing that fostering local, independent businesses is preferable to generic, chain development.

The Proven Productivity of Work From Home

Because they must try to remain operational during and after natural disasters by running lodging hot-lines and providing maps to emergency crews, community-destination marketing organizations such as the one I ran in Durham, NC, until retiring a few years ago, were among the first, at least in this community, to empower staff to be able to work from home beginning as early as the mid-1990s.

By 1999, the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau (DCVB) was using the tool to provide workplace flexibility and to amp up already high productivity by another 20%. 

This is one of many reasons that organization has received four national Sloan Awards for Excellence in Workplace Effectiveness and Flexibility, after becoming the first DMO in the nation to be so recognized in 2005.

Between 2005 and 2010, the number of workers telecommuting in the four-county Durham metro area increased from just over 8,000 to nearly 11,000 which represents nearly 5% of the workforce.

The Durham metro area only appears to be below the national average of 10% because it provides such a large proportion of jobs for non-residents who commute in from in other metro areas.

Nationwide since 2005, the percentage of regular telecommuters has grown 66% while the workforce grew just 3%.  Half of the nation’s workforce is now able to telecommute at least part time.

I suspect the number would be even higher except that at least half of employers are ideologically conservative and not just because that group has been slower to embrace new things.

According to research done by Dr. Jonathan Haidt and others, a significant element of the moral matrix of conservatives is wrapped around the fear that people who are slackers will cheat the system.

According to the research in his new 2012 book The Righteous Mind, liberals tend to focus on fairness as equitable, while conservatives tend to focus on proportionality.

It is easy to put safeguards and monitoring in place to curb abuse, and there is evidence that there is less abuse from those that work from home than there is among those in the workplace in general.

Those who continue to deride the practice of working from home as “shirking from home” are well advised to read the results of an experiment by a major Chinese employer that was published a few months ago.

The study was led by Dr. Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University.

Something tells me though, that just as there are still employers who whine about receiving too many emails and instead of shifting to contemporary message platforms, still pine for the days of the snail mail in-box, there will always be executives who resist the concept of work from home.

They will be easy to spot fading away in your rear view mirror while still muttering about takers vs. makers.

The Audacious Sign of Things to Come

I was surprised when in 1989, just a few weeks after I signed on to jump-start Durham’s community/destination marketing organization, a now-deceased commissioner from another county dropped by to visit me in our temporary offices above Brightleaf Square.

After some pleasantries, I asked him what brought him to Durham and how I could be of assistance. He proposed that I simply contract with an organization down in Raleigh, one of more than a dozen towns and cities in his county, to do Durham’s marketing.

His proposal was audacious but not preposterous. As part of what in marketing is called an environmental scan, Durham leaders and my newly founded organizations had already confirmed that Durham is a primary city, not a suburb, and that this general area of the state is polycentric with no one dominant city at its center; and these are just two of two dozen reasons I shared with this visitor to illustrate why it made much more sense to market Durham on its own.

Little did I realize that this visitor would be one of many from Raleigh that I would encounter over the years, some more hostile, many far less polite but just as over-reaching, over-bearing and audacious.

Some would publicly call for my dismissal, or made donations to various organizations in an effort to isolate or corner me, and even distributed campaign donations in covert, but unsuccessful, attempts to get me fired.

From the vantage point of hindsight, these efforts were much more telling and humorous than disturbing.

One thing that became apparent repeatedly was the fact that when Raleigh or Wake County runs into a problem or causes a problem for itself or others, the issue is almost always quickly re-framed as a regional problem. And often decisions made there in self-interest are suddenly re-framed as regional to secure assets or underwriting from other communities.

Fortunately, the re-framing is never reciprocated by other communities, making Raleigh’s sense of entitlement seem even more obnoxious. While annoying to other communities such as Durham, it has never been permitted to inhibit cooperation on true shared concerns as was so well articulated when a Raleigh executive tried to reason with others there in my defense by stating:

“Creating serious regional cooperation requires all of us to respect and celebrate the differences that make this a great region and then identify the areas where we can work together to build a better shared place.

It does not mean Durham or Raleigh should function as a single place, rather our communities along with many others are members of a ‘family of communities’ each with a distinctive personality and a number of individual and shared interests.”

I thought of that Raleigh visitor who came to my office all those years ago as I read a new book entitled The Research Triangle: From Tobacco Road to Global Prominence. While the author is well above my pay grade, if I still had one, the book makes many of the same mistaken assumptions that long-ago Raleigh visitor made.

Beginning with the dust-cover, the book has a distinctively Raleigh-centric feel, even down to an extremely outdated characterization of Durham’s image. It also repeats a revisionist history of Research Triangle Park that snubs Durham’s role and many of the true pioneers of this namesake.

But where the book truly goes astray is in suggesting yet another layer of government just to resolve a problem caused by and centered in Wake County and Raleigh which is only one point of the Triangle. Ironically, any new layer of multi-county government would of course be dominated by Raleigh and Wake County and essentially put the “fox in charge of the hen house.”

It is Raleigh-centric hubris, greed and dishonest representations by developers and realtors that created sprawl by misrepresenting the geographic layout of the region, distorting commutes, diverting relocating executives and philanthropy and creating the need for massive amounts of infrastructure.

Serious discussions about growth and development and cross-community impacts are taking place and must continue but another layer of government, especially one controlled by the biggest offender, is not a solution.

What is needed is a mutual respect beginning with a new honesty about the geographic nature of the region, and when problems do occur, a sense of honor and responsibility by the communities or counties that spawn them.

Be Aware of the Challenges Presented by a Commuter-Heavy Non-Resident Workforce!

Significant challenges are presented by the fact that two of every three people (66%) working in Durham, a single-city county, are non-resident commuters.

This is many times the national average and Durham’s proportion only drops to 54% if you exclude workers commuting in from other parts of the four-county Durham NC Metro Area.

This means that the majority of people working in customer service, tourism, working Downtown or providing government services or news outlets or in schools or universities or Durham-based Research Triangle Park don’t actually live here.

The 110,000 non-residents working in Durham is 96% higher than the number of actual residents working here and more than quadruple the number of Durham residents who commute elsewhere to work.

More common in very small populations with a fraction of the jobs, this proportion of non-residents working in Durham is very unique for a county this size. It is for example:

• 42% higher than the proportion of non-residents working in four similarly sized counties in North Carolina.

• 43% higher than the three year average for Wake County and Raleigh, anchor of a metro area to the south and east.

And the proportion is not offset by the number of Durham residents working elsewhere. For instance, 29% of Durham workers commute from Wake County, virtually defining it as a bedroom community, while only 4 or 5% of Wake County’s work force lives in Durham.

Here are just 10 of the challenges created by the proportion of non-residents working in Durham:

• Even if positive about Durham, they give visitors and newcomers, governing boards and nonprofits a Raleigh-centric misimpression even though 74% to 80% of residents in Durham and other communities in the region prefer to characterize where they live as a specific city, town or county and not as one large area.

• Given the opportunity to host work-affiliated business travelers or association and corporate meetings, they are predisposed to direct them to out-of-town venues, robbing Durham of millions of dollars.

• Less familiar in every aspect, they give visitors, newcomers and non-local news media a diffuse impression of the community, off-setting the fact that Durham residents are nearly three-times more likely to be passionate about their hometown than other communities according to scientific measures.

• They are more susceptible to contamination by misperceptions, folk history and myths and predisposed to water-cooler gossip.

• Needing to affirm their decision not to live in Durham, they are likely to redirect or misdirect relocating executives, visitors and newcomers.

• They are less intimate with Durham, the values and traits that make it distinct as well as its features, attractions and novelties and more likely to be insensitive to its challenges and issues.

• Voicing opinions in board rooms and meetings, on listservs and in public hearings as though they are residents, they often make it hard for true Durham residents to hear themselves think and create a distraction during problem-solving and awareness.

• They flood applicant pools and compete with Durham residents for jobs that are generated here or in businesses attracted, here, often with local government incentives..

• They drain Durham of philanthropic resources by redirecting workplace, personal and business donations to where they live.

• The disproportionate number of non-residents require Durham economic development, cultural and community organizations to deploy far more resources into things like hospitality training and awareness, fundraising, stakeholder education and awareness as well as protecting the Durham brand and identity.

The proportion of non-residents working in Durham also offers three potential advantages to the community:

• At least familiar with the road pattern and general locations, non-resident commuters can be attracted back as day-trip visitors composing in part the 70% of those dining, shopping or attending events who are non-residents.

• While meager compared to what non-resident commuters drain from the community in wages, they do spent an average of more than $115 a week work-side.

• When properly and proactively informed, when they report home, non-resident commuters can help counteract folklore and and other misinformation about Durham back where they live or at least put it in context.

Destination marketing and other economic development organizations are well advised to monitor census data, as DCVB does for Durham, for the proportion of commuters working in and representing their communities to external audiences like visitors and newcomers including relocating executives and businesses.

Duke Is Nation’s Favorite College Basketball Team

They may have lost last night in a bid to repeat as the NCAA tournament champion, but the Duke University men’s basketball team has been once again ranked the most favorite college basketball team in the country.

The annual scientific generalizable poll was conducted by Harris Interactive last week and released this week.

The second most favorite team, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is also located in the four-country metro area centered around Durham NC, a census designation.

Duke University women's basketball team ranked 6th most favorite following UNC-CH at 5th.

While news commentators perpetuate anecdotes citing that fans love to hate Duke, the Durham team has now been ranked the most favorite in 8 of the 14 years in which the poll has been conducted, first or second in 13 of the 14 years. Duke’s lowest ranking was third and that was more than a decade ago.

Other scientific polls have long shown Duke most favorite among residents of Durham and surrounding counties but second statewide.