The Centrifugal Forces of Identity and Inequality

Short memories recently heralded the news of Durham, North Carolina’s population growth by attributing it to a revitalized downtown.

But that doesn’t explain why Durham was the fastest growing city in the state over the decade of the 1990s, a decade before downtown’s reawakening.

We forget that the Census of 2010 identified 178 million square miles in the U.S. where no one lives, meaning that around 47% of the America is unoccupied.

Carolina Demography reminds us that a decade ago, 40% of the nation’s counties had lost population between 2000 and 2004 including 10 in North Carolina.

But in the period between 2010 and 2014, 53% of the nation’s counties lost population including more than half of those in the South and half of the 100 counties in North Carolina, one of the nation’s fastest growing states.

Some of this is due to out-migration and some because the remaining population is aging out.

Rather than seeking to study and emulate places such as Durham as a “best practice, a few, very frustrated regressives in state legislatures here and across the country are pushing through repeated legislation to defile cities.

Otherwise reasonable people, they fit the definition Gallup uses in studies to identify those who seek to undermine any work environment, as “actively disengaged.”

But this relatively small group of regressives isn’t the reason this ongoing defilement of places is taking place in states such as North Carolina.

The enablers are those peers who are merely disengaged, roughly half, according to studies.

Just putting in time, these enablers fail to study or even read legislation trading the input of constituents for that of special interests paying for access or hoping for reciprocity.

An eventual sea-change when it inevitably comes will be when voters begin to hold accountable this latter group.

People often wonder if cities and towns really matter to people, in part, because it seems so many are in such a hurry to destroy what makes them distinct and marketable.

But surveys which I repeated in a former life after seeing confidential results of polling by news outlets show that individual cities not only matter but so do the neighborhoods and streets where dwellers live.

Since the 1950s, when broadcast licenses were issued for television, those meant to serve Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and more than 20 surrounding counties, used their airwaves instead to try and erase the identities of individual communities.

The reason, of course, was that they could charge more to advertisers if they could hoodwink them into believing consumers would commute long distances to buy something readily available closer by.

Repeatedly, however, opinion polls showed that overwhelmingly, people preferred to characterize where they live by the name of a specific city, town or county.

Next in characterization came specific neighborhoods and streets and a very distant fourth came the notion of region so desperately pushed by broadcasters.

Rather than castrating cities and towns or trying to stamp out their identities, or pit rural and urban areas against one another, we should look at where the problems intersect.

A good start might be to carefully read a Brookings Institution report released last summer entitled The Growth and Spread of Concentrated Poverty, 2000 to 2008-2012 when the number of people living in distressed neighborhoods grew by 5 million.

Secondly is recommended a study of Complete Streets, particularly as they relate to economic development.  Don’t get too literal as you read this.  Strategically, it is relevant to rural areas as urban.

Third is a book entitled, The Vanishing Neighbor and its explanation of the importance of networks, especially those involving the less intimate “middle rings.”

Tying these resources together, a reading is recommended of a new book entitled Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by renowned sociological researcher Dr. Robert Putnum who also wrote Bowling Alone and co-wrote American Grace.

Putnam traces the roots of today’s inequality and lack of upward mobility through towns, neighborhoods, families, parenting, schooling and community and proposes remedies in each area.

What he calls the centrifugal dispersion that altered cities and towns creating economic and class disparities, especially racial, probably also created a vacuum and related suction, as centrifugal forces do in a pump, that similarly also impacted rural areas.

We need to work together not against one another to resolve both.

It must begin, I believe, by electing truly engaged public officials at every level and in every district.

I am referring to representatives who are willing to stand up against special interests and who hear the voices of all citizens equally, even if they are not raised equally.

How To Truly Help Rural Counties

The State of North Carolina pours millions of dollars more per capita into into the state’s 85 rural counties yet still half of the state’s 100 counties have lost population since 2010.

Those rural counties that haven’t lost population usually owe it to being within the commute zones to metro areas such as Durham where non-resident commuters hold down 2 out of every 3 jobs.

Not only do commuters not help shoulder their share of the costs for quality of life and sense of place amenities that make work-side communities such as Durham so appealing to job creators, those that create sprawl push the costs off onto others.

In other states, commuters often pay a very small payroll tax to compensate the cities to which they commute, but instead, North Carolina continues to make residents of urban areas subsidize those from rural counties.

For instance, the special transit taxes levied to relieve the congestion commuters create is levied not on the counties where they choose to live, but on the residents in urban counties who already choose to live closer to their jobs.

Go figure!

Now a few state legislators want instead, to further worsen that inequity by letting commuters and daytrip visitors from rural counties take home any sales tax revenues they generate work-side or there as tourists for purposes other than work or school.

These examples show a fundamental lack of understanding of the basics of economic development and the unintended consequences of other wealth transfers when the state builds or improves roads to and from rural counties that are not warranted by traffic.

Economists and others who measure economic impact and generation separate economic development into supply-side and demand-side.  Ribbon-cutting officials usually focus on supply-side such as paying incentives for businesses to relocate or expand.

Demand-siders such as those familiar with visitor-centric economic development know that this is the surest and purest way to generate economic development and impact.

A decade ago, many of us coalescing around statewide tourism issues suggested that the state tourism development be refocused on rural counties including the development of capacity there to draw tourism from the state’s urban areas.

This dawned on some of us when it was revealed that 80% of the state’s tourism related tax revenues are generated by the state’s urban areas.

This impact was generated when counties were given the option of shouldering special taxes on visitors to self-fund visitor promotion that is collectively many times greater than that budged by the state.

Some of us proposed that the state should refocus its entire tourism promotion budget in support of rural counties including helping them promote instate visitation from urban areas.

Tourism in rural areas appears to be a “chicken and egg” dilemma, but it really isn’t.  It doesn’t begin with recruiting hotels, which don’t create visitor demand, but are built to serve it.

Tourism begins in rural area with “retained tourism.”  This is when a rural area takes a full inventory of its assets and locally-grown businesses, features and events and works to encourage residents there buy and experience local.

State tourism officials could then begin to shape those local assets into tourism identities by conducting marketing designed to encourage residents of urban area to experience these rural areas on day-trips.

They won’t have to encourage me.  I love riding our Harley Cross Bones through rural North Carolina and nothing more than discovering a local restaurants or store there.

As the volume of day-trippers grows to these areas, residents will develop bed and breakfast inns and as promotion of the assets in these communities fills those rooms, other types of commercial lodging will take an interest.

Existing and new home-grown stores, restaurants, features and events, bolstered by “retained tourism” from residents as well as daytrip and then overnight visitors, will gradually expand capacity and become more sustainable.

This is also the best way to draw the attention of entrepreneurs seeking to start new businesses or executives seeking to relocate or expand because more than 80% visit areas as tourists before announcing their search.

The formula works, but it takes patience and learning to appreciate those things that make each rural area distinct.  It also requires that the state help to protect these areas from blight such as billboards and teaching that traditional advertising is no longer an effective marketing strategy, particularly on a small budget.

Residents of urban areas, such as me, love North Carolina’s rural character, especially when it is safeguarded from blight.

We want its rural character to be sustainable and to thrive but not through the misguided examples of those urban areas which have fallen for “built it and they will come” supply-side ruse only to sell out their sense of place and soul to mainstream interests.

This, tragically, will make them indistinct and unworthy of love and eventually visitation.

Helping rural areas makes sense, but it won’t be achieved as some in the legislature are trying to do now by pitting rural areas against urban areas as well deconstructing urban areas by redistributing even more wealth and permitting special interests such as billboards to once again defile them.

Instead, state policy makers should incentivize rural areas to learn from the mistakes of many urban areas including the failure to index population growth to developable land while factoring in the value of forest, open space, historic scenic preservation.

Maybe a good start is for the course elected officials take to include an understanding of demand-side economic development.

Because We Let Them

My memory was jogged when two residents of the Carolinas were charged with trafficking firearms last month in New York City’s biggest illegal gun bust.  One of the men lives in a town less than an hour southwest of where I live in North Carolina,

Soon after being recruited to Durham in 1989, I was called for jury duty in Federal Court in Greensboro, about an hour’s drive west.  The charge was illegal firearm trafficking, and the defendant may have had ties to the same town, if memory serves me.

My memory is that the defendant’s attorneys in the trial, where I was serving two decades ago, argued that the purpose for crates of grenade launchers kept in his mother’s basement were merely collector’s items.

Fortunately, a plea bargain was reached before the trial actually began.

When voters turned control of North Carolina lawmaking over to Republicans in 2010, its leaders quickly used some unorthodox ways to propose and pass a constitutional amendment designed to ban same-sex marriages, a measure that overwhelmingly failed in diverse and accepting cities such as Durham, where I live.

Through the lens of many subsequent actions in the General Assembly such as those designed to overturn prohibitions on billboards and guidelines to protect neighborhoods and sense of place,  thin buffers along streams, strip local governance of airports etc. their actions seem quite anti-city.

In the 1970s, more than 50% of North Carolinians lived in rural areas. Today only about a third do.  Two-thirds live in urban areas and 43% live in the ten most populous counties alone.  It seems Republican strategists are adopting anti-urban policies using a coalition around issues like tolerance.

One way to describe the divide by workforce is a hierarchy defined last year by Dr. Richard Florida.  Rural means more machinists and makers while urban means more executives, scientists and engineers.

But Journalist Emily Badger wrote this month for The Atlantic Cities that across the nation, “The rural-urban divide is increasingly a point of political conflict.”  Badger had previously written about why cities are growing more democratic.

How ironic if the Republicans exploiting this divide actually have the last word on the “class warfare” they decry.  I missed it but apparently they put it in their party platform during their national convention in Tampa.

Before federal emergency crews helped rescue it from devastating flash floods earlier this month, officials in the northern Colorado’s Weld County placed a Tea Party-backed resolution on the ballot for this fall to secede and form a new state.

South of Denver, in the hours before floods devastated El Paso County and Colorado Springs, rural voter turnout narrowly recalled the Colorado Senate leader and former law enforcement officer who had introduced successful gun control legislation.

If not humbled by the storm, those obsessed with gun-rights at all costs may be sobered to know that a recent analysis of hospital costs associated with injuries due to firearms shows that 52% falls on the general public, most of which is then passed on as a hidden tax on premiums those who are insured.

The study also finds that regionally, a higher rate of household gun ownership correlates with a higher rate of visits to hospital emergency rooms, costs that should be borne by gun enthusiasts and manufacturers, not unsuspecting tax payers.

From personal experience, many gun-rights hardliners tell themselves a story that gun violence is all about black people and that accidents involving children 12 years old and younger (which happens at a rate of one every two days) are also somehow a reflection of socio-economic issues.

I assume they mean poor people.

Those I know who feel strongly about gun control are distracted by the absurd, such as large magazines for rifles, when the real problem has always been handguns, especially those sold without background checks.

There needs to be a balance, but in my opinion, gun rights are way out of balance with public health concerns.

Stigmatization around issues such as this may be what inspired a Montana Kleagle of the United Klans of America and former hotelier to recently call for five Pacific Northwest states including, I assume, my native state of Idaho, to be set aside exclusively for white people.

Of course, I can only assume he means only non-Hispanic white people.

Remember, the UKA has its roots in the resurgence of KKK activity in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation decision.  KKK membership quickly grew to 50,000 when I was a teenager in the early 1960s.

Racism today is far more subtle, not just because racists of every color are more subtle, but because so many use claims to justify a bad attitude or a sense of entitlement, possibly including being anti-city

More persuasive to me that it is still prevalent is in a study published last year.  It reveals a bias among those in the medical field that Blacks and Hispanics feel less pain and therefore require less pain medication.

Representative democracy doesn’t seem very representative these days, when a small faction of the country controls nearly half or more of the representatives.  But I agree with Badger that re-segregation isn’t the answer nor is dividing the country up in tiny pieces where we only live with people who look and think just like us.

We live in a time when we are letting tiny groups with extreme opinions on isolated issues control public policy.  They do because they can, and they can only because the rest of us let them.