Two Differences About This New Wave of Durham Lodging Construction

Durham, North Carolina is poised for another burst of growth in its number of lodging guest rooms.  With properties currently underway, including the Hampton Inn & Suites opening later this year next to Northgate Mall, the current 7,650 will expand to 8,600+ by mid-decade.

Net older lodging properties that were retired for various reasons over the past two decades, this represents a nearly 200% increase since Durham began to emerge as a visitor destination, spearheaded by formation of a destination marketing organization.

Lodging represents only 2% of all tourism-sector organizations and collectively reaps just 19% of overall visitor spending.  But it is an interesting indicator to watch because new guest rooms are built only in response to a community’s current and future visitor vitality and typically only after demand has been generated to justify them.

With far less developable land, the City of Durham may be 79% smaller in population than Raleigh, one of the core cities for the next metro over.  But currently with 43% more lodging guest rooms per 1,000 residents, city to city, Durham may be growing smarter as a destination for visitor-centric economic and cultural development.

Two things are different with this burst of Durham guest room expansion.  One, nearly 300 guest rooms will be located in Downtown Durham, doubling inventory there and exceeding the historic peak in 1970.

More significantly, we’re also seeing the first time a world-wide lodging chain will emulate Durham’s architectural sense of place.  This isn’t the first visitor-related facility to emulate Durham’s sense of place - that status belongs to The Streets at Southpoint and Main Street.

It is no surprise though that George Stanziale is involved with shaping the design of both projects.

The 145-room Residence Inn in the Brightleaf Square District will not only embed the façade of the historic 1926 McPherson Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital but appears to me to emulate an adapted-reuse-remnant of Erwin Mills that stretches along Ninth Street on the other side of Duke’s East Campus and complement the wonderful adaptive re-use of The Kings Daughters Inn around the corner.

I’m not an architectural expert but I’ve had some experience with place-making.  While I doubt the hotel’s design allays every neighborhood concern, I know from working with chains of all types over the years how unique it is for lodging developers in particular to go to this extent to pick up complementary architectural details in new construction, even though it makes much better sense from a business viewpoint.

Local governments should be setting an example but it seems to me that all too often officials back themselves into a corner with their own construction by getting too far along in the “needs” process before factoring into specifications for architects the importance of scale and design in historic and cultural districts, as evidenced by several recent projects in Durham.

That’s just one reason I’m very heartened by the appointment of Bob Ashley as the executive at Preservation Durham.  Using invaluable private resources like award-winning Endangered Durham, I hope PD, under Bob’s leadership and with the backing of the Durham Heritage Alliance co-anchored with DCVB can persuade local officials to seriously address the need both in the public and private sectors to have Durham thoroughly inventoried both by neighborhood but also by period and type of architecture.

Only when we specify as a community what we truly must preserve can we successfully protect the “built” aspect of our unique sense of place.  To do that we need to also identify what we won’t be able to preserve while ensuring stringent design policies for private developers and local government developments alike.

Trying to protect everything on an ad hoc basis will ultimately just sap our enthusiasm and support for preservation while discouraging good developers.

So Where Do Americans Want More or Less Government Spending?

I like this observation made two weeks ago about the now official Republican budget/deficit reduction proposal from a senior official in President Reagan’s very conservative Republican administration and former Republican member of the House of Representatives:

“Trapped between the religion of low taxes and the reality of huge deficits, the Ryan plan appears to be an attack on the poor in order to coddle the rich.  To the Democrats’ invitation to class war, the Republicans have seemingly sent an R.S.V.P.”

Politicians aside, for anyone actually caring about the spending priorities of the American people, I recommend an annual scientific opinion poll I’ve been following each year since 1973, the year after I graduated from college.

Fielded by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, the results are formulate by taking the percentage wanting more spent in an area and netting out the percentage thinking too much is spent in that area.

For those who don’t want to read the year to year trends for each spending area from 1973 to 2010, here are the most recent top ten priorities where American people want more government spending:

+68.6% Education (remember, these are ranked by the net of those thinking we spend too little and those who think we spend too much)

+57.6% Assistance to the Poor

+51.2% Crime Reduction

+48.9% Social Security

+48.5% Environment

+46.0% Drug Use

+43.8% Childcare Assistance

+41.4% Healthcare

+39.1% Drug Rehabilitation

+36.4% Law Enforcement

American priorities for more or less spending over time are certainly not on automatic pilot.  But Education has been a top spending priority since 1989.  Improving Healthcare was number one in 2004 and second from 2006-2008 and now following healthcare insurance reform has dropped to eight.

Assistance to the poor was the tenth priority in 1996 and second this year but  Americans think less needs to be spent on welfare.

Republicans at the state and national level are well wide of the mark with current attempts to cut or gut environmental protection which has ranked in the top five priorities for “more” spending each of the last five years.

As for two other areas the Republican caucus has seemed to resist, roads and bridges and mass transportation at the 11th and 12th priorities for more spending, still very high.

If politicians are truly looking for places Americans think less needs to be spent, the survey reveals those as well – beginning with defense, welfare and foreign aid.

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.

Facing Extinction

The Founders of this nation, including Alexander Hamilton, the brilliant mind who laid the groundwork for today's market economy, were as fearful of unbridled capitalism as they were the tyranny of monarchs.

I only have two experiences with labor unions: one during a brief stint before law school when I worked as a production foreman in the plate inspection area for Kaiser Aluminum Trentwood Works and another a year earlier while researching and writing a college senior thesis about Wayne D. Holley, who was a labor leader and a active member of the Communist Party in this country while also an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon,) now the most politically conservative of all religions in the nation.

Of course, I should probably include the last year of high school debating both sides of the notion of compulsory arbitration for labor-management disputes.

These experiences are also my only window into the thinly veiled political motives exhibited by some Republican Governors bent on trashing collective bargaining.

My personal experience with USW-Local 838 workers at Kaiser was positive.  Folks there worked hard and several helped teach this then-management-novice the ropes and how to get the most productivity without crossing the line.  This also happened to be the same union in which Holley was active at Geneva Steel just north of where I obtained my undergraduate degree in history.

But I've heard the war stories about unions.

Not just corruption which, while far more publicized and reviled, is really no more prevalent than management white collar crime.  This includes the current mess which has resulted as described in an op-ed published last week by President Reagan's budget chief and “trickle-down-economics" guru David Stockman in “a quasi-bankrupt nation saddled with rampant casino capitalism on Wall Street and a disemboweled, off-shored economy on Main Street."

I think union reform begins not with trashing collective bargaining, but internally by getting rid of anything that protects or rewards people who don't do their job or that erodes productivity or throttles innovation.

Unions today and the country in general need people like Wayne D. Holley, not because he was able to juggle two seemingly contradictory values such as deeply, conservative Christian beliefs with Communism and Socialism, but because he refused to be pigeonholed by either/or labels.

Incidentally, Holley was my current age when I conducted hours of interviews with him on the big lawn at the house he shared with his wife Helen (who passed away a few months ago at age 92) in the small town of Mapleton, Utah, just south of where I was nearing college graduation.  The 32-page paper that resulted suddenly came to mind again when I received a recent message via Facebook.

It seems that two young college students were unable to find a copy of that 1972 paper.  They apparently could see it cited in a few other papers and speeches published by true scholars, as well as in university archives. Unable though to put their hands on a copy, they wondered if I happened to still have a copy and if could I send it to them digitally.

So I dug out my fading forty-year-old mimeographed copy (the format required at the time,) scanned it and created a link for them to access, and at the same time, to better preserve it for the family history I'm creating for my grandsons, who are now nearing ages 6 and 8. 

It is weird now that I’m retired to read something I wrote prior to the beginning of my career.  I had forgotten how early on I gained appreciation for iconoclasts, something for which my current hometown of more than two decades is well known, and a term some occasionally applied to me during my now concluded four-decade career in community marketing.

Today, we could use more people like Wayne Holley, who passed away eight years ago at age 93, not just because he was a Mormon and a Communist and a labor leader but for the reasons I revisited while rereading my 40-year-old Introduction to that paper:

“It has long been understood that an imperative requirement for survival in any society is the ability to maintain a flexible, viable, changing posture.  It has been common experience that those institutions that insist on facing the complicated, multi-factored problems of modern society with unchanging, inflexible and rigid attitudes face extinction.  The core issue involved is the age-old difficulty of getting along with those who think differently, learning to accept disbelief systems with a graceful, open mind.”

The response I received from the two students after I forwarded a digital link to this old student paper was “not bad Dude!”  But I think they meant “not bad” for an old Dude facing extinction.

More Than A Marker

There is no more beautiful place to ride a motorcycle than through the hills and dales and forests and farms and across the rivers and lakes of northern Durham on sweet, winding two-laners.

My route often passes a historic marker noting the life and death there of U.S. Senator Willie Preston Mangum (1792-1861) but it makes no mention that next to his grave, not far from there and just off the roadway, lies that of his son and only child, Lt. William Preston Mangum.

Mangum was elected to the U.S. House for three years in 1823 and then as U.S. Senator from North Carolina (next to last to ratify the U.S. Constitution) from 1831 to 1836 and then again from 1840 to 1853.  Elected to the State Legislature in his 20’s, he devoted his life to public service.

His experience in governing was dominated by issues that were euphemisms for slavery, the “elephant in the room” left unresolved during the nation-making that followed the Revolutionary War.  In a way that still typifies people who live in Durham today, Mangum was iconoclastic.

Some examples surrounding issues that sound familiar today:

• Elected a Jacksonian Democrat, he broke with that seventh President of the United States to help found the Whig Party.

 

• While North Carolina was a slave state, strongly favoring agrarianism over manufacturing,  Mangum’s Whigs tended to be educators and professionals, manufacturers, business-oriented farmers, upwardly aspiring manual laborers, free blacks, and Presbyterians, Unitarians, and Congregationalists.

 

• Mangum also bucked the State legislature and opposed Jackson’s destruction of the National Bank in part on grounds it was unfair to slave (agrarian) states, a move that threw the nation into a deep and long recession, much as threats about the debt ceiling could do today.

 

• He was deeply involved in shaping compromises to preserve the Union, yet Mangum sided with South Carolina’s insistence then, as it would again thirty years later, that it could opt-out of any law passed by the Federal Government to which it didn’t agree, much as some want to do with healthcare reform today.

 

• While representing a slave state, Mangum was a constant friend of the Eastern Cherokee during the struggles following Jackson’s Indian Removal Act that relocated five settled and civilized Southern tribes to lands west of the Mississippi River.

 

Following retirement from public life, Mangum’s health deteriorated as he watched former fellow-Whig, Abraham Lincoln, struggle to hold the Union together, the secession of South Carolina 150 years ago this month, followed by the secession of next-to-last North Carolina a month later.

I can imagine what was running through the old Senator’s mind as his only child enlisted as one of 50 members of the Flat River Guard under Captain Robert Webb and then deployed two months later under then Colonel Stonewall Jackson in Prince William County, Virginia at the First Battle of Manassas (aka Bull Run to the North) as part of the 6th North Carolina and the Third Brigade of then Brigadier General Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of the Shenandoah.

Young Lt. William Preston Mangum was cut down on July 21, 1861 taking Henry House Hill, a key Federal artillery position.  He died on the 30th, one of 5,000 casualties in that fist major land battle and one of the first casualties from a state that would suffer more than any other.

It must have broken the old Senator’s heart both for the loss of his son and the apocalyptic nature of things to come.  He died of a stroke two months later.

Fast forward four years and the same General Joseph E. Johnston who had commanded young Lt. Mangum at the First Battle of Manassas met in Durham at what is now called Bennett Place. This was just a few miles south of the twin Mangum graves where he negotiated with Union General William Tecumseh Sherman the surrender that effectively ended the Civil War and restoration of the Union.

Durham quickly led North Carolina into each of the nation’s three Industrial Revolutions and beyond, first with manufacturing and then today with an economy centered around research and development, technology, biotech, pharma-manufacturing and higher education.

Now 150 years since his passing, Senator Mangum would smile as we celebrate the first anniversary of Bull City Forward and Durham’s prominence as a center for social innovation and entrepreneurship.

But he would also shake his head at some of the issues that threaten the Union, even today.