Durham’s Achilles' Heel

Durham NC, my adopted hometown, has an Achilles' heel.  It's not what you might think from some news reports.  By 4 to 1 residents feel or safe or very safe in their community including 5 to 1 among women and 5 to 1 among those who feel very strongly one way or the other.

The Achilles' heel isn't public education either.  By 8.5 to 1 residents have a high or very high image of Durham public schools, including  6 to 1 among newcomers who've been here three years or less despite being subjected to water cooler myths perpetuated by realtors in nearby communities and people who work but do not live in Durham.

Durham's vulnerability certainly isn't community passion, where residents are 15 times higher than the benchmark, nor is it community loyalty where residents are three times higher than the benchmark.

Durham's Achilles' heel is aesthetics, not related to its unique sense of place and architecture but to simple curb appeal in publicly maintained areas, which residents rate four times lower than the benchmark.  Emblematic, by 3 to 1 Durham residents disagree that Durham roadsides and medians are well kept.

The concern is not just about litter although the presence of litter is a predictor of not only more litter but underlying neglect. Resident concern about aesthetics includes the lack of mowing, overall landscaping and the general appearance of roadsides and medians including unrepaired ruts and damage too systemic to be overcome by some cosmetic flower plantings here and there.

The concerns are also about the aesthetics of the community as a whole, including both the City and County not just particular neighborhoods such as downtown.  Any remedy will also involve subsequently motivating the North Carolina Department of Transportation, which is responsible for many roads in Durham, to follow suit.

Resident perceptions of the community as a whole are informed in contrast by how extraordinarily well kept various Durham assets are such as Duke University, The Streets at Southpoint, Northgate Mall, Research Triangle Park, several Downtown districts and the co-owned airport.

Aesthetics is an Achilles' heel and critical for any community to address because research has shown it to be one of the top three drivers of community attachment, pivotal to attracting and retaining talent and economic vitality.

The good news is that just as curb appeal is critical to holding or increasing the value of an individual residence or commercial property, greatly improved aesthetic upkeep by the City and County can be viewed as self-funded by the increased property tax valuation it will generate for local government as a return on investment.

Adrenaline Fixes Trump Popular Will

At least at the local level, one of the great ironies of a representative democracy is that, once elected, officials seem to pay much more attention to anecdotal opinions and how angrily they are expressed than they do popular opinion.

I'd definitely be among the vaunted 1% if I had a dollar for every time I've heard a public official apathetically dismiss an issue because they claim no one had been calling them late at night to complain about it.  Partly to blame is a vicious feedback loop. Fewer and fewer people vote so local officials interpret that as a mandate to only listen to a small, vocal share of the population which leads the population, in general, to continue to ignore elections.

Sometimes a member of the governing boards of community organizations, watching the example set by elected officials, might dismiss scientific generalizable survey results by saying “that's fine but I know one or two people who are still dissatisfied,”  implying that somehow the opinions of one or two people should trump the vast majority.

It is an overstatement to say that the federal electoral college system was established because a few of the framers thought that voters would not know enough about issues to make informed decisions at the ballot box. In reality, that now antiquated and unpopular system is yet another remnant of the compromises demanded by slaveholding states fearful that they would lose influence if elections were based truly on the popular vote.

But officials today, who listen to only small groups of vehement people as a means to determine the importance of an issue, are in essence distrusting that the popular will can be truly informed.  It is probably also for the same reason that officials are often distrustful or dismissive of scientific, generalizable public opinion surveys.

As a result, issues devolve into cheap adrenaline fixes, not only taking much longer than needed to deal with, but making those who are charged with dealing them even more vulnerable to powerful special interests.  Officials are tied down with little-picture tactical decisions that suck valuable oxygen away from the strategic decisions that are the essence of governance, while also distracting public administrators from day-to-day operations.

But what do I know, I'm just a voter.

Being Independent Doesn't Mean Ambivalent

I wasn't always an Independent, politically, or a moderate. I was raised in what was then an ultraconservative part of the state of Idaho by very conservative parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles. Exposed to many different and equally valid perspectives in college and law school, I became progressive in many ways before evolving into the moderate Independent that I've remained for the last several decades.

Independents are not ambivalent, as some people claim, but they simply cannot be pigeon-holed into one or the other major political party or ideology.  I'm conservative on some issues, even libertarian, and progressive on others and I find myself a pragmatic moderate when it comes to problem solving.

According to surveys the vast majority of members of the Democratic Party are moderate so, when my pragmatic moderate side shows itself, many people assume I'm a Democrat.

But when my now-concluded career in visitor-centric economic development would frequently take me into business circles, many people there assumed I must be Republican even though ideologically business owners and managers are equally distributed among Republicans, Democrats and Independents.

I've always found organizations built around orthodoxy, whether religious, political or social, to be more than a bit disconcerting. It just seems that for the vast majority of people who seek strict affiliations it becomes a reason for not thinking and, even  worse as a means to prevent others from thinking and sometimes to try and control what they think.

When I became a Rotarian in the early 1980s I was drawn not only to the purpose of the organization but but also to the fact that a key value of Rotary is being nonsectarian. When I became president of the 200-member Durham Rotary Club, which will soon turn 100-years-old, I learned the hard way that many members confused nonsectarian with being secular.

There is a a huge difference and that can be clearly seen by clicking on the links in the previous paragraph above.

Several members of that club objected to the fact that one of the club’s charitable outreach programs was being sole-sourced at the time to one organization that required that recipients benefiting from their aid had to be proselytized to be Christians.  I took the issue to the Board of Directors and a roundtable of past club presidents and then checked with Rotary international and we determined that, indeed, this violated the organizations nonsectarian values.

I wasn't surprised that a few members objected when we announced the decision to broaden that particular project to include other organizations. Unfortunately, one member even resigned but I wasn't bothered by the controversy.  It seems like that is always been part of my job description.

However, I was surprised at the vitriol and personal attacks expressed by a few members in repeated e-mails including, surprisingly, many by a local government official and fellow Rotarian whom I expected to be be particularly sensitive to the importance of maintaining our nonsectarian position and values.

Frankly, it jaded me a bit on the club and after my term concluded, I drifted away for a few years. Many people get personal and vindictive when it comes to religion and politics. I've never been afraid to stand up to these individuals, but I usually find their stances distasteful as well as the impact their views reflect on the organizations they control.

That experience is just one small personal example that shows why a growing part of our population is becoming independent of religions and social organizations as well as political parties.

“Reawakening American Virtue And Prosperity”

Three days after first viewing the compelling chart shown below as it was published, I fell and shattered my wrist and broke my arm.  The contents of the chart crossed my mind frequently during three months of mending, a  process that continues for the foreseeable future with rebuilding strength and flexibility while the bone continues to grow around the screws.

Coincidentally, this accident also gave me time time to read and reread an incredibly insightful new book entitled The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity  by the noted clinical economist Dr. Jeffrey Sachs.

Sachs unwraps the mistakes that were made by both the political right and left that created the disparity shown in the chart below, especially the economic misdiagnosis of the early 1980s.  He also lays out a precise and very achievable plan to get back on track.

The misdiagnosis in the 1980s led to the demonization of government at the worst possible time and some cuts that were just plain stupid at a time when we needed to be ramping up to cope with globalization.  We can only imagine how much further along toward energy independence we'd be today had funding for critical research not been slashed during that time as part of that demonization.

This book is a must-read for anyone, regardless of ideology or political affiliation, who is sincerely interested in putting this country back on track.  We the people only get to vote once every 2 to 4 years. Special-interests vote every hour of every day through not only their lobbyists but by funding the two major political parties.

Even when we do vote the effect is diluted by the long-outmoded electoral college system, a remnant from the concessions framers made to slaveholding states and by caucuses that serve no one but political junkies and the news media.

But there is hope, as Sachs so clearly illustrates in his book.  Election year polemics and scorecard news coverage aside the onus is on each of us as we strive to reawaken virtue and prosperity in this country by pursuing his ideas about which I will blog more in the future.

I hope you see what I mean once you study the chart below and then read the book at this link.

Openness–The Road Less Traveled By

Probably because the word “tolerance” has a condescending ring to it, various research studies conducted over the last three or more decades which are designed to identify what makes a community attractive to talented people and thus economically vibrant shifted instead to using the term “openness.”

Durham, North Carolina, where I live, has been scientifically documented to be 2.3 times more open than the benchmark for communities in this state or across the nation.  The value of openness also surfaced as a key element in the community's personality as distilled a few years ago from a series of balanced focus groups and scientific surveys of the opinions of both residents and non-residents.

Maybe it was because I was new and people sought to influence my initial perceptions, but in the few weeks after I moved here in 1989 to jumpstart Durham's official community marketing agency or destination marketing organization, a position from which I have now been retired for two years, I had several encounters that shed some light on the struggles of the previous decades that most likely shaped the value Durham places on openness.

In one experience, a high-level state tourism official in Raleigh told me that Durham had always been a “black town.”  In another encounter I quickly terminated a recently-hired employee when I overheard him tell a Raleigh-based state association meeting planner that downtown Durham was just for Blacks.  Neither person meant their reference in a good way.

On another occasion, a prominent physician took me on a tour during lunch and pointed to a now-defunct shopping mall as “Durham's real downtown,” explaining that it “had to be built” because downtown Durham had been surrendered to Blacks.

I also heard firsthand about the family experiences of two friends who are nearly a decade younger than I am and who entered high school at the time of desegregation of the Durham public schools.  Both were raised in homes less than a quarter mile apart located not far from where I live today.

One friend’s family elected to send their high school aged children to the nearby recently desegregated high school where the student population is predominantly African-American. They went on to graduate with honors and have lived and worked in Durham to this day.

The other friend’s family, also Caucasian, elected instead to buy a second home in South Durham in which they lived one week each month so their high school-age children could attend a school where the students were predominantly white.  They went on to graduate with honors and also live and work in Durham to this day.

The descendants of both families celebrate the openness of Durham today.  Their stories along with two books I highly recommend gave me insight into how Durham's openness evolved.

One book entitled The Best of Enemies is the true story of how a man and a woman living in Durham, he the head of the Ku Klux Klan and she an African-American activist, worked together to desegregate schools here. The other is entitled The Provincials by Eli Evans which includes the true story of his father Mutt Evans a Jewish six-term Mayor of Durham during the 1950s and early 1960s who was also head of United Dollar Stores and who took the seats out of the store’s lunch counter so that standing Whites and Blacks alike could be served together while, at the same time, defeating a law and a judicial order intended to segregate them.

Jazz saxophonist performing and recording star Branford Marsalis eloquently articulated Durham's openness when, during an interview on The State of Things, a program on WUNC public radio, he described why he moved here:

"Durham is everything I ever wanted in a City. It's fair…You can find everything… people who are wealthy, people who are not wealthy, blue collar workers, white collar workers, farmers. They are all hanging out together. You go in the grocery store and you see people talking. It's not like the farmers on one corner and the lawyers are in one corner. In Durham, you don't have those stringent class lines."

 

While it is clear that Durham chose “openness” when “two roads diverged in a yellow wood” it is also evident that many communities and a high percentage of all Americans are still conflicted if not, contrary.  It is often quoted that in 1940, only 18% of Americans received some sort of government benefit compared to 49% of households today who benefit in some way from nearly two-thirds of all federal spending, as one essayist did on Christmas Eve.

Those who quote these statistics seem to fail to grasp, though, that from the 1930s to the 1950s government programs were purposely designed to primarily benefit only White people.  It is interesting that such a large portion of the population only became concerned about how many people were benefiting when, as a result of the Civil Rights movement, legislation was passed to grant those same benefits to all Americans, regardless of race or class.

Understanding when that shift in opinion began to occur reveals a lot about the rationale behind today's polarized public discourse. Just sayin…