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.

The Greening of Revitalization

Inertia may be the reason Durham, North Carolina, where I live, was able to dodge complete destruction during the two-decade era of so-called Urban Renewal following WWII.

This occurred to me while viewing a screening of a short but impeccable new documentary about the adaptive reuse of the old Lucky Strike factory in Durham which began ten years ago.

In December, it will be aired on WRAL, a television station with the same owner and then hopefully it will be online as a must-see.

It wasn’t the first or even the largest of the complexes now emblematic of the commercial, “built” portion of Durham’s sense of place but it may be the most impeccable job ever done anywhere.

Brightleaf Square had been brought back to life as a template twenty years earlier, followed by an early phase of West Village, historic buildings part of an even larger complex nearby, though not under one roof.

But the fact that these wonderful buildings were able to survive the indiscriminate Urban Renewal movement at all is probably because they were still operational as factories and warehouses during the period between 1949 and 1979 which was so devastating across the country to sense of place.

The movement’s intended targets were “brownfields,” areas of abandoned industrial blight.  But instead it became a virtual “wrecking ball, in the hands of officials pushed by developers bent on destruction of landmarks including entire city blocks and priceless ethnic neighborhoods.

Even as a remarkable, overlapping 15 year span of renewed concern for preservation of “sense of place” kicked off in 1965 with the Highway Beautification Act, Urban Renewal had just begun to reach down and hollow out mid-sized communities such as Durham.

The HBA was intended for scenic preservation and restoration of trees including scenic views while limiting billboards to areas already blighted and zoned commercial at the time of passage.

This resurgence of sense of place preservation also included the National Historic Registry, protection of environmental assets such as pure water, clean air and endangered species and Supreme Court validation of preservation of place as a legitimate role of government.

The capstone was an incredible essay in the early 1980s anointing the overarching importance of sense of place.

By then there had been “sense of place revolts” in communities such as Durham, an uprising hastening the end of Urban Renewal and ushering in the era of adaptive reuse and gentrification.

Maybe not by coincidence, the term gentrification was first coined more than fifty years ago at the dawn of that renewed concern for sense of place by urban sociologist Ruth Glass in her book entitled London: Aspects of Change.

There are many different forms of gentrification, even tourism gentrification, but the term essentially refers to adaptive reuse or redevelopment of urban spaces including ripple effects such that it displaces working class people in exchange for middle and upper classes.

It is the two-edge sword of gentrification to sense of place.  On one hand it preserves some aspects while on the other hollowing it out, a consequence as destructive practices of Urban Renewal.  But It isn’t just people who get displaced.

In his study of two gentrified neighborhoods from the perspective of those displaced entitled There Goes The ‘Hood, Dr. Lance Freeman describes that it is also community values and cultural norms, even more temporal aspects of sense of place, that are at risk.

I arrived in Durham to jump start the community’s first official community marketing organization fewer than 24 months after American Tobacco shuttered its 14-16 acre factory in Durham after more than 110 years of operation.

The second of two failed attempts at its adaptive reuse was underway.

The documentary focuses on the third which succeeded in part because community marketing had lowered barriers to financing and tenancy by turning around negative perceptions fostered in neighboring communities.

But even the subsequent investment of more than $100 million dollars by local governments, as well as government historic tax credits and and new market tax credits which were invested would not have tipped it into success without Duke University relocating resources in Durham to serve as an anchor.

But the outcome is also the result of extraordinary developers who with grit and determination focused on resurrecting and creating sense of place.  Even documentaries can only tell part of a story.

Today, entrepreneurial spirit is noted as a result, a value that can be traced historically back through time here to Durham’s very roots.

But the idea of entrepreneurialism as an outcome from gentrification also traces back to 1989 and a paper published by Dr. David Harvey, the author of Spaces of Hope, during the year of that founding of Durham’s community marketing agency.

But an aspect that should have dawned on me decades before reading a newly published history is the relationship of adaptive reuse and gentrification with urban open and green space including green infrastructure.

Spokane, where I began my career took a very different approach to Urban Renewal than Durham where I finished up five years ago and still live.

And we are reminded by an incredibly insightful doctoral dissertation by a BYU alumnus of mine that it didn’t begin there during my tenure with Expo ‘74, an environmental World’s Fair.

A professor now at Weber State, Dr. Jeremy Bryson wrote his dissertation is entitled, The Nature of Gentrification, using a play on the word “nature.”

The transformation in heart of Spokane actually dates to a 1907 with a report by the Olmsted brothers which was then tabled until the 1950s when community leaders sensed Spokane’s downtown too was losing steam and fear had set in that a decline in downtown property values would follow.

In the 1960s, Spokane voters turned down bonds until business leaders caught on that what resonated was not rescuing downtown but cleaning up the riverfront and removing blight that obscured the 140’ falls and islands at the heart of the community.

But voters were skeptical of downtown property owners and a third bond fell 3 percentage points short of the 60% needed for approval.

Unlike Durham which looked to visiting taxpayers, who don’t get to vote, to subsidize the public sector investments in American Tobacco, Spokane businesses voluntarily shouldered a business and occupation tax on their profits.

Still, the effort ended up displacing not only the still-operational railroads blighting the waterfront but through a gentrification ripple effect, also hundreds of low income people in an area called Skid Road.

Researchers in the 1960s and 1970s began quantifying the value or green space to real estate.  By the 1980s and 1990s, the models showed an escalation in the value added by scenic views such as green infrastructure and savvy elected officials began taking notice of the return on investment in tax revenues.

As early as 1984, Durham officials banned billboards in part to increase values followed by placing a scenic overlay over Interstate 40.  By the early 1990s, officials in many cities began to quantify the contribution to tax revenues from scenery.

Evolving a community that is true to its values, sensitive to sense of place, including being affordable for a diverse spectrum of residents will continue to be worthy of love.

Residents and officials should be wary of new development that promises jobs, fuels the local business climate and broadens the local tax base at the expense of deteriorating its sense of place or by treating it merely as an amenity for formula development.

Never be afraid to say no.

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.