Reconnecting the Dots

A neighbor of mine lives along one of Durham’s most beautiful parklands but fails to see the irony whenever he complains that the city should focus less on greenways and more on funding hard services such as police.

He would be well advised to read a book, published earlier this year by a friend of mine, entitled Conservation Communities: Creating Value with Nature, Open Space, and Agriculture.

In part it details the type of development now underway in Durham by a young entrepreneur I met just I was retiring called Wetrock Farm.  Since we met he graduated from Duke and completed an MBA at the University of Miami before returning to the Bull City.

Durham is a single-city county by the same name, the fourth largest city in North Carolina and located in the 17th smallest county by land area.

Making this a tight fit is that the northern third of the county has been set aside in watershed.  Restricted this forms a sort of natural urban growth boundary but also guarantees that this part of Durham’s sense of place will remain rural and open.

Wetrock will exist in what Durham has set aside as “conservation subdivisions” (see article 6.2.4 in District Intensity Standards,) a best practice as I will describe later in this essay that belies a paradoxical failure to connect the dots overall.

These are areas designed to provide clustering of houses and structures in a way that preserves wetlands, streams, woodlands, wildlife habitat, historic and archeological sites as well as “authenticity” and sense of place.

Specifically, Wetrock Farm will develop 230 acres into 141 home sites with 2/3rds of the land preserved as forest.  It will also incorporate trails and a working farm with 140 acres permanently protected by a conservation easement.

All of this will be just 10 miles from amenities such as Duke University and the City Center District, 12 miles from North Carolina Central University and only 14 miles from Research Triangle Park just on the other side of Downtown.

Too bad this rationale wasn’t applied to every neighborhoods here as they began to take shape a hundred years ago.  In fact, even business districts such as downtowns.

The book Conservation Communities uses real estate research to quantify the dividends communities reap from developments such as Wetrock Farm:

• Environmentally sensitive areas are protected along with water quality and urban forest canopy.
• Property owners reap a dividend in the form of higher property values.
• Local governments reaps a dividend in increased property taxes used to fund overall community services such as public safety.

Up through the 1970s and into the 1980s local government officials across the nation used to do a much better job of breaking dividends such as this down for residents and connecting the dots for folks like my neighbor.

Then it seems they suddenly stopped connecting the dots for themselves as well as witnessed somewhere in the first decade of my now-concluded career.

It is also how the insanity of “front end” subsidies, oh I mean incentives were born, another word for “legalized” panhandling.

In Durham for example they began very slowly hollowing out funds for basic community upkeep which in turn soon began to degrade curb appeal, which dampened property values, which slowed tax revenue, which resulted in more hollowing until a vicious cycle took root.

Of course, the intent was to restore upkeep before anyone noticed but gradually it became the new norm and then one day local governments began to whine that basic maintenance and upkeep of appearances was somehow an unfair burden.

Of course, this wasn’t a strategic decision.

If I hadn’t been a witness, it was easily gleaned from books such as The United States of Ambition that moves such as this take shape when politicians began to sense that “keeping people happy” by doling out these funds instead was far more rewarding and fun than upkeep.

But this has contributed to creation of a feedback loop where residents are frustrated and resistant to paying taxes (in reality only a tiny but vocal minority) so officials try to appease them by holding the line.

This, in turn, forced the year-to-year absorption of increases to the costs of living such as goods and services which means budgets for maintenance and upkeep get “rabbit-holed” into a downward spiral, which undermines resident confidence.

It is how communities that are otherwise seemingly vibrant and “cool” on the surface, begin to slowly and imperceptibly degrade at the margins before falling again into a cycle of decay.

Now instead of running local government like a business with 5% of budgets set aside for maintenance and upkeep along roadsides, streams and other commons, local officials are more likely to feel put-upon by this responsibility.

Soon they resort to panhandling businesses and volunteers to get by never realizing the resentment this creates because residents and businesses then silently fume because upkeep is something they feel they already shoulder in property taxers.

It has been this way in Durham for nearly three decades.  Even the increasingly depleted news media seems to have bought into this feedback loop rather than shining a light on its absurdity.

As a good friend who is a university executive mumbled under his breath, on a walk one day, when I noted a few years that had been the exception, “it won’t be enough to reverse that dysfunction has become the default.”

But this paradigm is not one in which Durham is unique.

To paraphrase the legendary “outlaw” of my time, Waylon Jennings, a fellow stoic who wrote in 1978 just before this all began, “We’ve always been crazy but its keep us from going insane.”

It seems so thoroughly embedded in the psyche of futility common among nearly all public administration professionals now that they probably never knew it was any other way.

Sadly, so many of those elected to shift the paradigm seem converted instead within a few weeks of being sworn in.

It may be left to Millennials and social entrepreneurs like the young developer of Wetrock to reconnect the dots and return us to true sanity.

In the meantime, I swear to do everything I can to never be an enabler.

Rough Around The Edges and Proud of It!

It hasn’t been easy for assignment editors charged with planning local television news.  Mostly this is because television news hasn’t been local for nearly 50 years.

Viewership for Durham, NC where I live is measured over an area that is more than 100 miles by 100 miles and more than 100 cities, towns and counties.

It may be great for hauling in advertising revenues, but bad for advertisers and a nightmare for those trying to cover news over such a huge area with any hope of keeping it local and balanced.

Public opinion surveys measuring the image of Durham over the past few decades could often link where it was most negative by overlaying the viewing area of broadcast television stations.

But experts also found that the root cause of negative perceptions about Durham wasn’t so-called local television news as much as it was that others who were negative about Durham often contaminated those covering the news.

Some reporters and even anchors on television often had their judgment clouded and their objectivity contaminated by friends and neighbors centered in Raleigh who held virulently negative opinions about Durham.

Others were influenced when this negativity was then re-circulated around station “water coolers.”

In fact, one of the changes that helped turn Durham’s image around, largely between the years 1993 and 2000, was when news decision-makers at television stations began to pay attention not only  to “corrections” from Durham’s then newly-created community-destination marketing organization but also to the DMO’s data-driven advisories.

They noted that the problem wasn’t news coverage in general but the lack of balance by news type and as well an imbalance of news type between communities which leads to the zoning of troubling news. They also warned about the impact of tone such as condescension.

Some stations also listened to warnings that they needed to guard against news reporters who had been conditioned by negative views about Durham.  Some even began to require that news crews covering a community should also live there.

Ongoing cut backs have made that hard to sustain as you can tell by stories such as one that ran a couple of days ago on WRAL in nearby Raleigh about the kick-off of Durham’s annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, one of many signature events that occur here each year.

The anchors gave a great lead in.  The story begins well enough relating the appropriateness of the festival’s home given Durham’s noted authenticity.

But editors permitted an unrelated but stereotypical piece of stock footage – blue flashing lights - to be gratuitously inserted suggesting a crime scene about 26 seconds into the story with what could be taken as a snarky reference about Durham being known for being “rough around the edges.”

Rick Gall had to cringe.  He’s the long-time, award-winning (including an Emmy) news director at WRAL.  He first came to the Raleigh station in the mid-1990s.

He was running the assignment desk when Durham’s DMO - still using studies – was cautioning news outlets that the issue undermining Durham was not so much whether the news was positive or negative but whether it was balanced with similar coverage in other communities and free of negative “spin.”

Gall helped others at the station and in journalism to understand how trying to cover such a huge geographic area with so few crews could lead to stereotypical coverage, especially at night when the temptation is to give emphasis to crime stories because they the easiest to cover.

He also encouraged reporters such as Erin (Hartness) Medlyn to live in Durham, which she did and still does after leaving the station last fall to work here at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

You can see a bit of Raleigh-centrism at the station coming through as the station’s headline announcing the move notes she is leaving Raleigh for Duke.  Actually she was leaving her position for WRAL to work at Duke in Durham where she also lives.

Errors, oversights or slights such as this and the one leading into Tuesday’s story on Full Frame are much rarer these days but Durham’s DMO is wise to be ever vigilant.  Being guardian of a community’s brand and image is all about content balance and context when it comes to news, not suppressing troubling issues.

Success is more likely when working with people of Rick Gall’s sensitivities, but it is nearly impossible given that viewers are spread over 10,000 square miles.  It is unlikely news crews can truly be locally-based or immune from having their perceptions contaminated.

Hopefully as television is devolves due both to the ineffectiveness of advertising and infinite fragmentation, a new business model can be found that returns truly local stations while still rewarding owners.

And by the way, an integral part of Durham’s brand is being genuine and authentic including, perhaps, remaining a “bit rough around the edges.”  However, we prefer to call it gritty and rarely use police lights to illustrate that.

Luckily, our grittiness has never deterred Durham’s commitment to continuing and never-ending improvement.

Diminishing Social Trust and America’s Failure To Thrive

I have a friend who lives in perpetual disdain of data, probably even more so now that Brad Pitt has made statistics sexy.

While friendly on a personal level, he is at the same time publicly dismissive of people in my now concluded career of community/destination marketing because they are “paid” to convey information about their communities. My friend probably hasn’t kept up with the latest research about motivation and drive.

He’s an old-schooler, and unfortunately, from what I remember from a few destination marketing organization (DMO) execs past and present, my friend has probably come by his cynicism honestly.  For instance, years ago I knew a DMO exec with hubris enough to believe he was entitled to make up statistics out of thin air just because he was the so-called tourism expert in his community.

As a whole, DMO execs are far more driven to make a difference and by a sense of purpose than they are financial incentives. But then again, maybe my friend’s exposure has been primarily to those in sales, whom the research shows can be the most vulnerable to unethical choices.

Statistics themselves don’t lie, but often people do.

A friend of mine in talk radio asked me how I knew that Durham had a level of passion, engagement and pride among its residents that is two to three times greater than other communities including those nearby that are held in seemingly high self-regard.

When I responded that it is benchmarked by scientific surveys, he quipped, “I’m glad we have them to tell us what we think.”  He’s obviously in the anecdote business and  I didn’t get an opportunity to explain to him that the anecdotes he enlists in his line of work are useless bases for decision-making unless they can be shown to be generalizable to an entire population.

Unfortunately, far too many news reports and news analyses are now the result of reporters interviewing reporters, heaping anecdote upon anecdote as though they will become reliable by sheer weight.  A fool-proof way to spot someone trapped in their own anecdotes is when someone responds to scientific research findings with a comment like, “well that’s not what I think.”

Uhhhh, ooookay!

Increasingly we hear interviewees on the news, including people seeking elected office, who indicate that individually they have queried tons of people across this state or this nation or even at a conference they attended to then bulwark their opinions.  The problem is that unless the sample was random and large enough, it is still just anecdotal and just their opinion, regardless of their personal expertise or experience.

We frequently hear how untrustworthy the news media is but surveys shows that the news media, especially at the local level, I mean truly local, not just 30,000 feet, is far more trusted (69%) than candidates running for office (29%.)  We hear how untrustworthy the federal government is at (44%) from Republicans but trust in business, a source of much of their campaign financing, is worse (41%.)

Another poll just released by 60 Minutes shows that overall more Americans trust journalists (76%) than politicians (6%.)  By 7 to 1 even Conservatives trust journalists more than politicians although they fall behind Moderates who trust journalists over politicians by 13 to 1 and Liberals trust journalists over politicians by 30 to 1.

A year ago, a survey benchmarked “social trust,” which was defined as “faith in people” or the honesty, integrity and reliability of others.  It came up with a “social trust index” based on how those surveyed responded when asked about who they trust, who they did not trust, who might take advantage of them, who is likely to be helpful or just looking out for themselves.

American adults scored 35% with high trust, 22% mid and 38% low.  Blacks and Hispanics had much higher levels of mistrust that whites.  Young people had higher levels of mistrust than older people, singles more mistrust than married people, lower income more mistrust than higher income, city dwellers more than rural dwellers, high school grads more than college grads, struggling classes more than professionals, non-military more than active military or veterans, non-voters more than voters.

People in the south had higher levels of social mistrust than in the northeast.  Moderates, Independents and Liberals scored more mistrustful than Conservatives.

However, it appears from another study that the ultra-conservative fundamentalists who are purging the Republican Party are negatively associated with social trust.  The authors of American Grace note that:

“Fundamentalist religious views are negatively associated with social trust…Social trust increases with religious attendance but decreases with fundamentalism…Religious liberals more often experience a loving God, and they are among the most socially trusting of Americans, whereas religious conservatives more often experience a judgmental God, and they are among the least trusting of Americans, especially if they are not observant.

For highly observant fundamentalist Americans, their theology inclines them toward skepticism about human nature but their frequent attendance somehow move them to a more optimistic view.”

This is the group that, although a small sliver of society, has monopolized news coverage for the last two years.  They want smaller government because they don’t trust government.  They seem callous to helping people because they fear these folks will take advantage.  They resist compromise because they don’t trust in win/win solutions.

These folks don’t just preach decline today.  They’ve preached decline since before the country was founded.    Like more than 90% of Americans, they believe in God but a judgmental God.  They are steeped in conspiracies and self-fulfilling prophesies.

They vote to cut funding for food inspection, environmental protection, pre-school education.  They are obsessed with “cut, cut, cut” at exactly t he worst time in the economic cycle.

A recent op-ed likened the excuse given by one of the 12 Republicans who voted against the most recent agreement to break a government stalemate to protest against dysfunction calling it “a little like protesting the slowness of rush-hour traffic by abandoning your car in the center lane.”

Maybe the fallacy of that official’s rationalization is also what’s at the heart of what one Conservative commentator means when he warns that “Segmented societies do not thrive, nor do ones, like ours, with diminishing social trust.”

“Without such trust, writes Mark Nepo in his book Finding Inner Courage, “we can turn blunt and cruel.”