Recovery by 2014

It appears from projections that domestic visitor person-trips won’t claw back to ’06 and ’07 levels until 2014 according to projections by DK Shifflet and IHS Global Insight.

That doesn’t mean recovery won’t begin as early as 2010. It just means it will take that long to rehydrate. And even when the number of “bodies” increases, it will take revenues--which have a delayed supply and demand reaction--much longer to reach and surpass their earlier levels. Most of the recovery will be leisure driven. It may take much longer--if at all--for business travel including conventions to recover.

Durham visitation has fallen harder than most because Durham draws a much higher proportion of travelers via air than other more "rubber-tire" destination areas either nearby or in other parts of the state. That means our visitor-related indicators are more robust, often by double digits over say Raleigh-Cary NC or Greensboro-High Point.

But the higher you go, the further and faster you fall when things decelerate as Durham learned in 2001, even prior to 9/11 and now during this downturn.

Durham needs to do everything it can to accelerate the recovery. City and County budgets depend on visitors now for $40+ million to help fund everything from education and services to police and fire protection. This year just the room occupancy tax alone will be down $1 million.

Unfortunately, just when DCVB needed to be at its most vigorous, we had to begin cutting back on expenses as early as November. We’re down as well in staff resources by 30%. But that’s the down side of self-funding visitor promotion with a tax on visitors.

The good news…the decline has bottomed…still spongy and hasn’t started back up but it has bottomed.

Miscues A Result of Misuse of the Airport Name

Business Week is the latest victim of indiscriminate use of the airport name as the name of a place.

By perpetuating the myth that RTP is located “between Durham and Raleigh”, it ends up being nowhere, e.g. “located “outside Raleigh-Durham, NC” as it was in an otherwise insightful article by Peter Engardio. In fact there is no such place as Raleigh-Durham.

And RTP has never been located between Durham and Raleigh. A retired RTP official told me that purposeful “mis-positioning” was originally hatched by the Raleigh Chamber several decades ago when he worked there as a way to distract relocating executives from the true location.

But as happens with these things, instead of rectifying it when discovered, the duped often try to restructure reality to safe face. And Durham may have been much too deferential and polite.

Indeed, RTP is mid-way between Atlanta and Philadelphia or Boston and Miami or Greensboro and Wilson. But it isn’t midway between Raleigh and Durham.

RTP’s actual physical location is Durham NC, four miles from Downtown, encompassed on three sides by the City in a special Durham County District. There is a small portion that spills over into Wake County near Morrisville. If the Park has to be midway between two points, it is in Durham, close to midway between Raleigh and Chapel Hill or more accurately Cary and Chapel Hill.

It is time to humble ourselves and take some advice from branding experts and refrain from ever misusing or permitting misuse of Raleigh-Durham as anything other than the name of the airport.

But is also long overdue for other parts of this family of communities, to “accept” the fact that Durham is the primary location of RTP or to paraphrase Garrison Keillor, they risk being increasingly viewed as small man in a toupe who thinks he’s Tom Cruise and makes you want to say “Stop That!”

To recognize the true location doesn’t require a mea culpa…every community in a 100 mile radius has benefited from RTP…now let’s just give it a home.

List Checkers

I affectionately refer to people whose work style or collaboration culture has little patience for discussion of concepts or process. They want to move immediately to alignment on key action items. That makes them pretty good at executing tactical things but more often than not, they rush off without any process or strategy in mind.

We’re all list checkers in the end; we just get to that point using very different styles. List checkers to me are people who use it as a dominant style. And there is nothing wrong with list checking; especially when you’re working alone and your actions don’t impact others. You can spot these individuals in a group because they tend to rush through discussions and have little patience for questions or alignment.

While I do my share of list checking, I come from a dominant style that tends to frame things in ideas, so I frame proposals in concepts. Then when aligned is achieved, for me the process and key actions seem easy and derivative. Makes me pretty fair at strategy, consistency and finding win/wins, but for a list checkers I’ve learned it is pure torture to have me in the discussion.

I can--and do--work with a lot of list checkers but I’ve seen the damage that results when list checking dominates or bullies a discussion prior to alignment on concepts and process.

• Too often, it results in actions that are unfair or imbalanced because they don’t take into account whether they are equitable, consistent or justifiable.
  

• Too often it leads to fragmented, “little picture” achievements that don’t add up to any coherent strategy.
  
  
• And it ultimately leads to not "listening” which often turns the discussion at hand into the politics of push and shove vs. collaboration. Oh there are achievements for sure, but at what cost?
  

But while most concept and process people can easily move to tasks, more often than not, list checkers find concept and process inscrutable. That’s probably why they are impatient. They don’t seem to know how or aren’t willing to ask the questions or clarifications important for alignment. Or worse, they don’t have any justification other than pure opinion.

Communities have dominant styles as a part of their brand. Durham’s dominant style is to work through concepts and processes because it tries to be fair and equitable. Often that means people need to be flexible about the end result and trust it can be win/win. But we also have our share of impatient list checkers who I’m sure feel frustrated and irritated at the dialogue necessary for alignment. They are also dismayed when ramming things through isn’t appreciated, regardless of the outcome.

Fast & Loose with Metro Areas

The inherent cultural differences between Durham and Raleigh can be seen in how respective news media located in these two respective metro areas depict them.

Raleigh is in the three-county Raleigh-Cary MSA, but the media over there often appears to ignore that and for some reason drops Cary.

They are probably some of the people who say that “everyone” calls it Raleigh. But if they could see some of the research on that point that I’ve seen over the years, they would realize it is obnoxious to most.

This is also an excellent example of why any branding expert will tell you being on the back end of a hyphen is the first step to being invisible.

On the other hand, the four-county Durham, NC MSA, which includes Chapel Hill, was not assigned a hyphenated designation by the Census - but the news media here often modifies the designation and adds a hyphen anyway.

Interesting juxtaposition. One very exclusive. The other inclusive.

"A Neighborhood With A Soul Can Make A Vibrant City Even Better"

The new ranking for Durham in Men’s Journal reminded me of an exchange with a consultant a few years back. I was cornered in a small office in City Hall and this guy had clearly been brought in to shore up a project.

Because my job is to ask questions, I was perceived as a threat to the project. Dismissively, he told me we needed the project because Durham didn’t have any entertainment districts. I replied, “that will sure be news to Brightleaf, Ninth Street and The Streets at Southpoint.”

This guy snapped back, “I mean something upscale, like a real city. Those places are for kids.” He obviously wasn’t at all familiar with organic, eclectic districts like Brightleaf and Ninth Street or had been greatly misinformed.

I suspect he was smarter than that and was here with one mission and that wasn’t to tell his clients what they didn’t want to hear. I got the impression he was following an approach enthusiasts often use to build support for a project by diminishing, denying, and denigrating any viewpoint that sheds light to the contrary.

Very un-Durham and we’re very fortunate the project got done at all. As an aside, this is why it is imperative for cities and counties to have a peer review of any feasibility work or at the least of third-party analysis by public authorities like DCVB.

But regardless of agenda or intent, this guy was also dead wrong and he must have known it. In Richard Florida’s first book, he literally describes places like Ninth Street and Brightleaf as indispensible draws for the Creative Class. And Creative Class and upscale certainly aren’t mutually exclusive.

If that didn’t connect the dots, now Watts-Hillandale, which noted along with Ninth Street District actually located in adjacent Old West Durham, has been ranked one of the best neighborhoods in the Southeast and one of only two in North Carolina (the other is in Asheville).

But the article leading off the rankings included a quote that also sums up why that consultant was dead wrong:

“A neighborhood with real soul can make a vibrant city even better. And enclaves of unique vitality can breathe life into unsung workaday towns – Men’s Journal.”

That says it all.