Bull City Mutterings

The Codependent Roots Of Tourism And Billboards

2012-05-18T03:53:00.001-04:00

Organizations dedicated to community-destination marketing (DMOs) date their emergence to 1895 during the Progressive Era even though towns and cross roads across New England had more loosely used nostalgia and pastoral views to draw tourists from industrialized cities as early as the 1830s the same period that villages and towns initiated the first urban tree planting and beautification.

So maybe it isn’t so coincidental that destination marketing began to formalize the effort to draw tourists to and between cities at about the same time reformers launched the City Beautiful movement to reform the approach cities took to architecture, parks, urban forest, boulevards etc.

City Beautiful was preceded by the mid-18th century village improvement societies and succeeded by movements such as the National Roadside Councils in the 20th century and they give root today to organizations like Scenic America and affiliates such as Scenic North Carolina.

It is puzzling to me then why so many community-destination marketing execs today seem so detached from their role as guardians and curators of sense of place. In my now-concluded 40-year career in destination marketing I often used trees and outdoor billboards as a litmus test.

If a colleague defended the blight and destruction created by billboards, it is my opinion they didn’t have a grasp of sense of place and their role in shaping and preserving it. But there is some history as well behind the ambivalence by some in tourism toward outdoor billboards.

The first DMO in Detroit was followed quickly by the emergence of one in Hawaii in 1902, St. Louis in 1904, Denver in 1909 until there were nearly 30 by 1920 when they met in association. To put that in perspective the number of cars in America grew from 8,000 in 1900 to 200,000 in 1908 and to 8 million in 1920.

But many early DMOs overlooked that new technology and remained fixated only on railroads and even more narrowly on the very small proportion (10%) of tourism which was then, as now, driven by conventions and meetings.

Railroads back then often partnered to create tourism such as when the Northern Pacific opened Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone National Park in 1903 followed by an alternative route to that park by the combined Union Pacific – Oregon Short Line railroads in 1910, which passed four miles east of my great grandfather’s homestead-ranch, the year this very cool “Where Gush The Geysers” brochure was published.

That year the Great Northern Railway developed tourism facilities in the newly opened Glacier National Park. Attendance to national parks rose from 356,000 in 1916 to 1.5 million in 1925 and 2 million in 1927.

As the population of America grew from 69 million, when the first DMO was created, to 76 million in 1900, to 92 million in 1910, to 106 million in 1920 and 123 million in 1930, the still relatively new technology of automobiles democratized tourism to cities, towns and regions.

As the population and the number of cars grew, the new roadways created for them expanded, outdoor billboard companies turned against the downtowns they had literally wallpapered until then and claimed the mobility of the great outdoors, dismissing technologies such as telephone, radio and magazines as being for “indoor people.”

As detailed in her 2004 book Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles and the American Landscape, Dr. Catherine Gudis documents how the 1920s emerged as the “heyday of civic boosterism.”

During the post-WWI “real-estate speculation boom of the 1920s, enterprising communities,” across the nation, “sought to attract business and tourism dollars or to develop their rural areas by forming groups devoted to publicity” now called community-destination marketing organizations.

Today there are several thousand community-destination marketing organizations worldwide, more than 1100 in North America alone, all pursuing visitor-centric economic and cultural development for the places they represent.

Outdoor billboard companies were quick to publish articles such as one in 1922 entitled “A Few Tips On Selling A City” describing, according to Gudis, how “marketing a place as a commodity entailed selling a packaged identity to potential businesses, visitors and residents including the pleasures of nature, history, commerce and climate.”

As they are often now, DMOs then were easily seduced by seeing the name of their community “up in lights” so to speak and quickly a co-dependency with billboards was formed even as this soon-to-be-obsolete form of advertising was serving to dissolve the distinctiveness of communities, deliberately fueling sprawl and substituting stereotypes for unique sense of place.

Gudis writes, “tourism became a means by which drivers could be made into consumers and the landscape into consumable merchandise.” She also notes that the dominant themes of auto tourism were always contradictory – embrace of technology [auto and billboards] and a quest for pastoral, non-commercial world of the great outdoors.”

But today community-destination marketers can no longer afford this codependency. Savvy marketers increasing realized that billboards no longer serve a purpose.

Highway signs, navigation technology (now used by nearly 60% of drivers,) the general decline in the effectiveness of advertising, standardized roadside exit logo advertising and non-destructive and more effective out-of-home advertising alternatives have made huge outdoor billboards redundant.

Community-destination marketing organizations as well as tourism related businesses such as restaurants, retail stores, theaters, sports facilities and lodging businesses can no longer afford or tolerate the blight, tree cutting and view obstruction outdoor billboards create.

An Era Of Sprawl Mitigation

2012-05-17T06:12:00.001-04:00

North Carolina prides itself on a diverse sense of place, but newcomers and visitors nearly always sum it up in one word – trees.

But trees and forestland aren’t a given in a state that is already 125% more densely populated then the national average. Thanks to a study of urban trees in nearby Tennessee, we know that the replacement value of North Carolina’s 1.4 million acres of urban forest would be more than $86 billion.

More than $13 million of that is the replacement value for just those urban trees along transportation corridors through North Carolina’s cities and towns.

So why in this time of fiscal crisis were outdoor billboard allies permitted to sneak a bill through the last legislative session that sacrifices huge swaths of these publicly-owned roadside trees with no requirement for payment or replanting or respect for local values?

Why is it that the legislature is willing to sacrifice hundreds of urban roadside trees, each valued at $76.26 annually according to economists, just to increase already-adequate visibility for outdoor billboards which are valued at only $57 in annual property taxes, both in 2008 dollars?

Where is the fiscal sense in that? Why aren’t outdoor billboard companies being required to not only pay for and replace these trees but the scenic easements they take without compensating the public?

In fact, why aren’t outdoor billboards assessed the cost of the roadways upon which they prey and the costs of sprawl for which they have gleefully taken credit since the 1920s?

The good news is that although North Carolina is 28% more densely populated than neighboring Tennessee, it has managed to retain or reforest 8% more urban forest.

The last few years during the economic slowdown represented a huge missed opportunity for urban forests and developers alike when during the economic slowdown, cities, towns, counties and states elected to slash planning budgets instead.

This would have been a perfect opportunity to take a breather to make or update “detailed, long-term projections of all development needs” and to conduct in-depth “inventories and assessments of current land-use patterns and development potential” as recommended by a 2004 study by the Brookings Institution.

It is good news that the authors projected that only 1/3rd to 1/2 as much of the new/replacement development taking place between 2000 and 2030 will be sprawl. More interest in new urbanism and better infill or replacement development, as well as adaptive reuse of historic structures, is all positive but these trends require more planning, not less.

Cities like Durham, NC, where I live, have been asked to sacrifice developable land so down stream communities like Raleigh could grow; but now our community is also being asked to shoulder more than its share of improvements to that water quality without access to the assessed value it made possible there.

The good news is that it means a good proportion of Durham is set aside in natural area-watershed. More good news is that one of the mitigation strategies will be to convert developed parcels into park-like and reforested pocket wetlands in neighborhoods.

More good sprawl-mitigating news is that much of the new growth/replacement development being forecast for the future can take place in parking lots. The Urban Land Institute projects that America is one-third over-parked. This means that not only can parking areas be reduced but there is an opportunity to greatly improve the parking that remains by requiring far better tree planting.

Judging from the lots around the places I shop in Durham, this community is one-half or more over-parked to use the Institute’s term.

But developers don’t like surprises. A compact community like Durham (fourth or fifth largest city shoehorned into the 17th smallest county in terms of land area) City-County Planning must be more adequately funded and updating ordinances must be done with far more intensity.

The Brookings Institution report projects that by 2030, half of all existing development will have been built since 2000. The proportion is even higher in the South. Two-thirds of all of that development will be driven by growth and replacement – valued at $23 trillion – more than any other generation.

For example, 38.8 million units of residential will be needed to address new population growth but 20.1 million units will represent replacement of units lost for various reasons resulting in the need for 58.9 million new units of residential in America between 2000 and 2030.

Dr. Laura L Carstensen, the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity in a recent TED talk said that “culture is that crucible that holds science and technology and wide-scale changes in behavior that improve health and well being.”

One of her Center’s reports continued:

“The US Census Bureau projects that the over-sixty-five population in the United States will grow from thirty-five million in 2000 to seventy-two million in 2030 to eighty-nine million in 2050.

The number of people eighty-five and over will grow from 4.2 million in 2000 to 9 million in 2030 to 19 million in 2050.

Dr. Sherwin Nuland tells us in his book, The Art of Aging, that today 64 percent of Americans can expect to live to seventy-five and 35 percent should plan to reach eighty-five.”

So obviously older Americans will have a lot to say about our ability to grow while minimizing if not reversing sprawl and protecting our nation’s life support system:

“… an interconnected network of waterways, wetlands, woodlands, wildlife habitats, and other natural areas; greenways, parks and other conservation lands; working farms, ranches and forests; and wilderness and other open spaces that support native species, maintain natural ecological processes, sustain air and water resources and contribute to the health and quality of life for America’s communities and people.”

New Realities of an Older America, a Stanford longevity center report published in 2010 notes that the “number of households in America grew from 63 million to 111 million since 1970 – of the 48 million increase, 30 million settled in the suburbs.”

Now the number of older suburban households has tripled, as have the number of single person households. The nursing home population has hovered around 1.3 million since 1985.

But as the report notes, this will change. “The number of 85+ Americans in nursing homes will double between 2030 and 2050. The choices older Americans make about housing have the potential to re-shape our communities just as dramatically as their suburban choices and dramatically larger home sizes did since 1970.

We’ve come a long way since it emerged a hundred years ago but today there is no more critical investment we can make than in robust and reinvigorated urban planning.

Innovating Social Welfare

2012-05-16T06:14:00.001-04:00

As I was growing up in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of the Book of Mormon belt that arched from southern Alberta, Canada to Mexico and sweeping over Las Vegas to San Bernardino, a claim was often heard among the million adherents at that time that the federal Government had copied the Mormon welfare system.

That has never been substantiated, but both systems did both tap into some common lineage before coming of age during the mid-1930s and the Great Depression.

While they may not have crossed paths, within a little more than a year the entrepreneurs behind each plan had volunteered at Chicago’s Hull House, a turn-of-the century outcome of the Progressive movement and were mentored by its founder Jane Addams.

Amy Brown Lyman, who would go on to lead the Relief Society, a Mormon women’s auxiliary, stopped in Chicago during the summer of 1902 on her way east during her husband’s sabbatical and not only took a class at the University of Chicago in the relatively new subject of sociology but also volunteered at Hull House.

After accepting a teaching position in 1904 in Lake Forest, Illinois, Frances Perkins volunteered for Addams at Hull House before becoming a cabinet officer through all four terms of the Roosevelt administration and championing the Social Security Act of 1935.

Thanks to written and oral histories left by a slightly younger contemporary, my great aunt Vera White Pohlman, the full story of Amy Brown Lyman’s contributions have re-emerged and informed scholarship such as that by Dr. David R. Hall of Cal State Fullerton.

The lifetime contributions of Lyman support a claim often made today by Dr. Mathew B. Bowman (no relation), a professor at Hampden-Sydney College north of Durham where I now live, that Mormonism is as much a “community” as a church and that while it is the most conservative of all faiths today, its members have a “surprisingly deep affinity for Progressive politics.”

When she returned to Utah from that sabbatical, Lyman lobbied passionately for creation of a social welfare department in the Mormon Church which she led for many years after its creation in 1919.

She even won election to the state legislature in 1922 to champion Utah’s participation in a nationwide program to promote infant and maternity care as well as establishing a hospital and a training school for the mentally disabled.

The common struggle shared by Perkins and Lyman was how to scale up social welfare to the size needed to truly address the magnitude of the challenges. Republicans then as now opposed any role of government, hoping instead that disparate private agencies would somehow suffice.

Lyman was famous for reaching out to both non-profit agencies as well as local and state agencies to leverage efforts by the Mormon Church until behind-the-scenes lobbying among male leaders finally forbid it. The mastermind behind that move was a former Hoover administration official, J. Rueben Clark.

Perkins succeeded and so did Lyman in a way. Mormon leaders who disparaged Roosevelt programs as the “dole” when they were launched in 1935, created an “inversed projection” by creating a “dole” of their own in 1936 by gathering, standardizing, centralizing and reinventing a number of programs including Lyman’s while freezing her out of the process.

Unfortunately, the program was hampered by politics, both gender and ideological, including a condition that can lead “individuals or groups to subconsciously rationalize a contradiction in their own self-conception by painting themselves as the victim instead,” something hardly unique to Mormons and often witnessed in news stories today.

But as effective as the 1936 Mormon welfare program was back then and as remarkable as it has evolved into today, it was no match for the scale of hardship during the Great Depression.

Statistical reports by federal officials at the time document that the by-then isolationist Mormon welfare program didn’t come anywhere close to making Mormons along the Rockies self sufficient from the federal programs nor were pioneers such as Lyman unaware of the problems associated with the inevitability of increased government involvement.

Overwhelmingly Mormon back then, Utah had among the highest per capita use of federal welfare programs during the Great Depression, yet, the church program stubbornly insisted it was “taking care of our own.”

Church members weren’t officially reauthorized to leverage efforts with those of other public and non-profit agencies until approximately 1991.

What is increasingly apparent to many experts today is that far too many social welfare programs are not cost/effective. They have lost the nimble and innovative characteristics with which they were inaugurated and long ago it became too expensive to provide recipients to work volunteer in return.

Too much time is wasted on attacking or defending rather than just cutting ineffective programs, trimming waste, eliminating fraud while also increasing funding for innovation and research for those programs that are effective.

All of this should be informed by the growing scientific evidence about human interactions with incentives including sense of entitlement.

A Nexus Of Roadside

2012-05-15T06:12:00.001-04:00

The first day of my most recent 6,000 mile cross country trip included a drive north up the spectacular 105-mile Skyline Drive through Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.

In stark contrast to that parkway, my drive that day was punctuated by a 26 mile spur of West Virginia, which links Virginia to Maryland via I 81, where the forests of that state were blighted by huge back-to-back double-decked outdoor billboards towering above the forest.

While that may be marginally better than allowing billboard companies to clear cut huge swaths in either direction, like North Carolina recently has, it is still a jolting violation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 revelation that no one owns the landscape or the “public right to view” nature.

Both stretches of that drive crossed my mind again last week on the anniversary of the warning given 109 years ago by a Republican President of the United States:

“Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children.
Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.
The world and the future and your very children shall judge you according as you deal with this sacred trust.”

Although dedicated and then replicated across the country during the 1930s by a Democratic President, the Skyline Drive parkway down the Shenandoah was initiated under another Republican President, Herbert Hoover, who had a cabin retreat in the valley below.

Although the first parkway had been launched only a decade earlier, the concept and the term had been coined 63 years earlier by the landscape architects Olmstead and Vaux of Central Park fame according to the book Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles and the American Landscape, by Dr. Catherine Gudis.

The Parkways concept envisioned much that was carried over into the Interstate Highways System such as:

“widely spaced and carefully controlled entrance and exit points”
alternate routes for trucks,
bridges and overpasses to avoid cross traffic
screening of “objectionable sights”
planting of “tens of thousands of trees and shrubs”
integration of roadways with “surrounding landscape.”

But soon a war broke out within transportation agencies that persists today. Some engineers couldn’t be bothered with roadsides, let alone treat them as parkland, preferring only the utility and function and efficiency of the roadbed.

Even today, engineers who champion the aesthetic, environmental and economic benefits of unfettered roadsides are either siloed away within these agencies or exiled completely to other agencies altogether.

Fortunately some highway engineers joined the roadside reform movement that arose in defense of the parkway movement even as the first federal-state efforts to fund motor vehicle roadways were launched before and after World War I.

While roadside reformers in the 1920s and 1930s didn’t have today’s data documenting the value of roadside trees to control water and air pollution, thanks to audits of roadways back then done in nearly two dozen states including North Carolina, they were armed with data that:

“transformed nature into scenery and codified it as a way to help audiences appreciate and savor experiences and, as Dr. Gudis notes, supported the view that …. ‘landscape offered lessons in national heritage, spiritual uplift and civic virtue,’ all selling points for tourism.”

The reformers were also beginning to understand something that research is only now documenting. Trees and landscape in urban and non-urban areas alike can transform “the roadside into a domestic enclave where one learned, through nature and beauty, moral rectitude and civility.”

Durham, where I live, is an ironic nexus of sorts on this issue of roadside reform. It is the:

headquarters of Scenic North Carolina, a statewide group dedicated to scenic preservation and current-day roadside reform
home to The Forest History Society
place that banned outdoor billboards in early in 1984 and then created a best practice overlay to protect the scenic character of I 40 along where it passes through but also,
birthplace to the Bull Durham tobacco company which in the 1880s famously hired four sets of painters to decorate rocks and barns along roadsides with outdoor advertising and now,
home of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing Research and an archive of 16,000 digitalized images of outdoor billboard advertising at Duke University.

Durham is also home to several generations of a family central to the parkway movement. Honored at Durham’s Annual Tribute Luncheon last month, the Teers began building roadways shortly after the founding of the Nello L. Teer Company in 1909 and the Federal Highway Act in 1921.

The Durham-based company was also awarded the first contract for the Blue Ridge Parkway to connect Skyline Drive and the Shenandoah down through North Carolina to the Great Smoky National Park. The company completed an astonishing 17 segments of the 77 year old Parkway.

Now in his 90s, the son of the founder, Dillard Teer is still able to point out the locations of old WPA camps which served as an “employer of last resort” along the roadway during the Great Depression as the Blue Ridge Parkway was built.

Fittingly, what is called “America’s Favorite Drive” was only completed in 1987 when the spectacular Linn Cove Viaduct resolved a significant conservation issue related to the final segment.

Robb Teer continues his grandfather’s legacy by serving with me on the Durham Appearance Advocacy Group and as a member and former chair of the RDU Airport Authority, he is a strong advocate for appearance around the airport his grandfather help construct in 1939.

Maybe it is time to revisit that notion of roadsides as parkland!

The Full Circle of Smoke Jump Dreams

2012-05-14T07:01:00.001-04:00

As Mugs and I, joined briefly by a friend, dropped down from Lolo Pass into Missoula, Montana on a cross-country road trip last summer, I glanced across the valley and over the Clark Fork to see if the Smokejumper Base was still there.

It was but the Missoula base with 85 smokejumpers now has been joined by nearly 10 others across the intermountain and coastal west including Alaska, all but two operated by the National Forest Service.

As we had tracked the 75-mile Clearwater River up across the north-central Idaho Rockies that day, I recalled how often I had dreamed of fighting forest fires, as I was growing up yet another day’s drive to the southeast along the Continental Divide in the shadow of the 1.6 million acre Targhee National Forest established in 1908.

More specifically I dreamed then of becoming a “smokejumper” and I could think of nothing more worthy in those early years than risking my life to save trees. It seemed as noble as the work of any of the super-heroes evolving at that time such as Captain Comet, The Fly and Flash.

Growing up just west of the Ashton/Island Park Ranger District, I had often heard the tragic story of how 13 jumpers died in another national forest two hundred miles north of that nook where the Centennial and Grand Teton ranges meet.

Much later, just a few years after I moved to Durham in 1989, where I now live and home to The Forest History Society, a 1978 forensic analysis of the Mann Gulch tragedy was published entitled Young Men and Fire.

The book’s posthumous publication was spurred by the huge popularity a year earlier of the movie A River Runs Through It, adapted from an autobiographical novella by author Norman Maclean and starring actor Brad Pitt in one of his breakout roles and directed by Robert Redford.

Growing up, as I did, in the Mormon culture of homesteaders along the famed Henry’s Fork of the Snake River where it drops out of the Targhee gave special resonance to a memorable line from the book and the movie:

“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.”

While I didn’t grow up to be a smokejumper or to fight forest fires, I did spend nearly 40 years as a community-destination marketing exec which involves putting out fires far more frequently than people might think.

And now as if to come full circle to that dream of my youth, one of my issue-based passions in retirement involves “saving trees” not from fire but from the blight of roadside billboards and the careless disregard and indifference of a few state legislators.

Author and screenplay writer William Hjortsberg, a friend of Maclean’s once described A River Runs Through It as reaching “into that dark area where you don’t know how to help somebody you love until it’s too late.”

I hope it isn’t too dramatic to think about saving North Carolina’s signature tree canopy and what better place to start than along its roadsides.

Infographic –The Shifting Age Structure

2012-05-13T07:41:00.001-04:00

For the full report containing this graphic, New Realities of an Older America, by the Stanford Center on Longevity, click here.

Infographic - America's View on Evolution and Creationism

2012-05-12T07:33:00.001-04:00

If it doesn’t open by clicking on the image, click here to see the full graphic created by the BioLogos Forum, a community of evangelical Christians committed to exploring and celebrating the compatibility of evolutionary creation and biblical faith, using data from Gallup Research, The New York Times, and the Pew Research Center.

Urban Timber Utilization Conference

2012-05-11T06:17:00.001-04:00

Long before he was President of the United States, FDR used an example learned during his youth to help pass an amendment to the New York State Constitution that helped reforest that state's canopy from 25% to 60%.

He had visited a town in Germany, whose residents, through careful management of municipal forest were able to enjoy the trees and pay for the cost of public services. This should not be confused with the idiotic proposals recently made by a couple of state legislators to denude every roadside of North Carolina.

A workshop will be held in Durham, where I live, on June 28th to inform entrepreneurial opportunities to utilize trees from North Carolina’s 1.4 million acres of urban forest. This is sustainable harvesting for trees that age out or fall during storms or are taken out by roadway expansion etc.

Currently such trees are simply disposed of, but expert panelists at the workshop will describe how these trees are being utilized around the country in part to help fund growth of urban forest canopy.
Click here to learn how to register. The workshop is sponsored by the North Carolina Urban Forest Council.

Protecting Sense of Place from Mobs With Torches and Pitchforks

2012-05-10T07:09:00.001-04:00

With a 1.5 to 1 favorability ratio nationwide and 39% unsure, Baltimore is evidence that it takes much more than a revitalized downtown and a trend-setting retro baseball park to fully rehabilitate a community’s reputation.

It is also one of the latest testaments to how tourism often kills the things it loves when a convention hotel, which a sports columnist in the region terms a "cruel cubist joke on a previously perfect ballpark," recently rose to block out the coveted view of the skyline there from Camden Yards.

That’s why, as a 40 year veteran of entities responsible for curating community sense of place to external audiences such as community-destination marketing organizations, I am relieved when I see thoughtful, data-driven and critical analysis being used to inform decisions and exhibit reservations such as those recently about the impact of cruise ships on Charleston, South Carolina or mega-casinos on South Florida.

I was just arriving in Durham in 1989 to spearhead an image turn-around here, where I still live, as construction was breaking ground for Camden Yards. Little did I know as I marveled at the sense-of-place genius of building it in a warehouse district, that a move was afoot that in less than a year would try to relocate the Durham Bulls.

A proposal was on the table to relocate the team to an adjacent city and county willing to subsidize the building of what journalist Steve Rushin describes in a lyrcal Sports Illustrated tribute to Boston’s Fenway Park as “state-of-the-art stadia …symmetrical quadruplets, multipurpose, multi-parking-spaced…” which displaced historic facilities around the country through the 1960s, 70s and 80s with concrete look-alikes.

“Stalked by baying mobs – of real estate developers, government officials and even proprietors - bearing metaphorical torches and pitchforks, wanting to do away with the beast…” as Rushin notes, historic and beloved facilities such as the historic Durham Athletic Park (DAP) were being displaced to a 65-acre geography of nowhere.

Durham was shell-shocked by the proposed loss of the Bulls, just months after the DAP, the team and the community had starred in the hit 1988 movie Bull Durham, still rated one of the top sports movies of all time and what historian John Thorn calls the “gold standard” of baseball movies.

Even the purported convenience of the proposed new location didn’t make sense. A student survey by North Carolina State University had confirmed that, without the warehouse ambiance of the old DAP and downtown Durham, the 60-70% of fans who commuted in from other cities were less likely to attend games.

Proving less and less differentiation, the era of customer satisfaction was already in its twilight and the era of customer experience was beginning to emerge. People were drawn to be in environments that make them feel genuine and authentic.

Fortunately in Durham, the “baying mob” didn’t include one brave City Council member, Chuck Grubb who rallied community opposition, found funding and persuaded the teams new non-resident owner to support and, to his credit help shape a new-to-look-old “Camden Yards style” ballpark.

The city-owned Durham Bulls Athletic Park opened in the mid-1990s, still in downtown Durham, became the catalyst for the adaptive reuse of the historic Lucky Strike and Bull Durham tobacco factories into creative class offices.

The district now anchored by DBAP delivers on the overarching Durham brand including the slogan “Where Great Things Happen” and hopefully any new construction will never block out the skyline.

It is also unlikely that Camden Yards in Baltimore would have become what it is without the teamwork of long-time mayor and then governor, the late William Donald Schaefer and then-Baltimore Oriole president Larry Lucchino,who credits the look for the ballpark to “his best off-season acquisition”, Janet Marie Smith, an urban park planner.

At the turn of the century Lucchino became part owner and CEO of the Boston Red Sox and with principal owner John Henry and chairman Tom Werner rescued historic Fenway Park from the wrecking ball that had threatened it every decade or so beginning in 1958.

Fenway was last declared dead in 1995 just a year before as DBAP was set to open in Durham. As Rushin notes in his Sports Illustrated tribute, Fenway dodged a bullet because the real estate magnate who proposed a new complex then turned out to be Frank McCourt who went on to bankrupt the Los Angeles Dodgers.

In fully renovating, restoring and updating Fenway to serve another century, Luchinno and his partners again brought in urban park planner Janet Marie Smith to work her magic on Fenway before she eventually returning to Baltimore and a role in renovating Camden Yard.

Sense of place is about much, much more than buildings but ballparks such as DPAB, DAP, Camden Yards and Fenway illustrate an important role and Fenway illustrate something even more important.

Such a facility doesn’t have to be new to be “major league.”

Skirting the Dells of The Mohawk

2012-05-09T06:50:00.001-04:00

During a road trip I’ll be taking in June, I’m sure he’ll be one of the people who will cross my mind as I travel up the Hudson River Valley for the first time. This will be my first venture in that state beyond the five boroughs of “The Big Apple.”

As I pass West Point, it will be hard for me to envision that New York had only 25% of its overall tree canopy remaining when President Franklin D. Roosevelt was born along that route, the impetus, I’m certain, for his determination to reforest America with more than 3.2 billion trees during just the last half of his lifetime alone, more than half a million at his own expense.

FDR leaned more toward conservation than preservation, often giving his occupation when voting as “tree-planter,” long after he became famous according to the author of an excellent new book entitled American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation.

Planning for the trip, I’m reminded that my first exposure to FDR, while growing up in the Rocky Mountains, was a small photo hanging in my great-grandfather’s tiny living room, framed on each side by reproductions of paintings by Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt, who were devotees of the Hudson River Valley School.

As I draw closer to where the river gets its start, I may stop at two sites which mark where my first American ancestors lived, one of whom first assembled the land where the town Hudson is now and the historic home of his grandson in nearby Claverack.

From there I will skirt the the dells of the Mohawk River and drive up and over the famed Adirondack Plateau, an area the size of nearby Vermont and framed by Lake Champlain on the east and the Black River on the west, until I spill out onto the plain leading to the St. Lawrence River, the ultimate end of this journey.

I’ll be cutting through the 26-million-acre Great Northern Forest, now the largest contiguous block of forest land remaining in the United States, stretching down from Maine through New Hampshire, Vermont and New York (which is back to 60% tree canopy) to the Great Lakes, 80% privately owned and possibly explored best via a 740-mile canoe trail.

Established in 1892, to me the Adirondack Park marks a pivotal point where Americans drew the line between unsustainable exploitation and renewable stewardship, which has become today the largest publicly protected area in the contiguous United States, a state park greater in size than Yellowstone, Everglades, Glacier, and Grand Canyon National parks combined.

Including parts of 12 counties, the boundary of Adirondack Park encompasses approximately 6 million acres, half public and half privately owned. However, the viability of that area was in serious doubt as ancestors on both sides of my family migrated west in the mid-1800s where they became conservationists and perhaps even a few preservationists.

They migrated west for religious freedom but also partly because unsustainable farming practices had devastated ancestral lands in the east and made them unsuitable for upcoming generations, making it necessary to abandon farmland and move west. By FDR’s time, nearly 5,000,000 acres of New York farmland was exhausted or had been abandoned. Erosion and contaminated water were extreme threats.

My ancestors had been re-established for a decade as conservation-conscious ranchers along the far side of the Continental Divide by the time the Hudson River School’s Bierstadt accompanied and documented the Lander Survey Party’s 3,000-mile search on horseback to map a route for the transcontinental railroad planned through the same area their wagon trains had crossed in 1847.

Bierstadt was followed by that school’s Thomas Moran who documented the survey that led Yellowstone Park to be established a few miles from what would become my birth place nearly eight decades later.

I owe my own passion for trees and conservation, as well as preservation, not only to ancestors who were determined to leave a land sustainable for further generations but to awe-inspiring images spawned by those who drew inspiration along the Hudson River.

When the General Assembly in North Carolina, where I now live, took office in 2010, there had been 100 years of recovery and restoration since that incredible 60-year period of desecration between 1850 and 1910 during which fully two-thirds of the deforestation of the last 400 years took place.

Soon, over the objections of 9 out of 10 North Carolinians, a few in our NC legislature - including ethically questionable ring leaders - rammed legislation through that is revisiting the backwardness of 100 years ago on the state’s scenic roadsides clear cutting them to accommodate the outdoor billboard industry at no cost, with no requirement for replanting or selective cutting and without regard to local ordinances.

Only time will tell if once again leaders will arise to end this insanity as they often have during the last hundred years or when they do how long it will take to restore North Carolina’s scenic character.

Until then I am inspired by the words of the late Thomas Berry of Greensboro:

“We cannot own the earth…we own property in accord with the well-being of the property and for the benefit of the larger community as well as ourselves…

The Great Work that is before (future generations) is moving the human project from its devastating exploitation to a benign presence…

We are chosen by some power beyond ourselves for this historic task…The nobility of our lives, however, depends upon the manner in which we come to understand and fulfill our assigned role…

We cannot doubt that we too have been given the intellectual vision, the spiritual insight and even the physical resources we need for carrying out this transition…from the period when humans were a disruptive force on the planet earth to a period when humans become present to the planet in a manner that is mutually enhancing.”

Measuring & Influencing Community Reputation

2012-05-08T07:32:00.001-04:00

Even if she hadn’t recently telegraphed the response she desired, I couldn’t bring myself to disillusion a new acquaintance from Michigan as she proclaimed to a group of us that a two year nation television advertising campaign by one of the Big Three with Detroit as a backdrop had turned that city’s image around.

Even before scientific studies began to document the gradual and alarming decline of the effectiveness of advertising, that element of marketing had been long discredited as a means to turn image around – simply because it lacks credibility – because it is you talking about yourself. But one area it still has traction is the sale of vehicles.

A scientific survey last month by Public Policy Polling confirmed that after two years of national television exposure, including spots run during two consecutive Super Bowls, Detroit’s reputation nation-wide is still a net negative by more than 2 to 1 with 29% of respondents unsure which had been predicted by experts in the weeks after the campaign launched.

I’m pulling for Detroit to turn its image around and I’m sure there are people there working extremely hard to do that. I know from experience that the formula for an image turnaround differs from community-to-community and must be based on carefully unwrapping and understanding the specifics related to audiences, internal and external audiences, both nearby and extended.

Things such as mega-events, mega-facilities or “being major league” are proven for far to long to be much too blunt as instruments to have any lasting effect on image. Even those attributed metaphorically with the so-called “billboard” effect, any change is fleeting much like that of the obsolete roadside medium.

Having had a hand in turning Durham, North Carolina’s image around, I’ve already written about how marketing intelligence or research helped us customize a formula here. I can tell you that the things many people signal as signs of the turn-around were a result of that phenomenon more than a cause.

I did take a moment though to compare the results of similar polls to document Durham’s popularity both within North Carolina and nationwide.

Within the state:

Durham has been the most popular of the state’s largest five cities since the 1990s with a more than 60% net positive and half the average percentage negative or unsure for the group.

Ironically, Durham’s net popularity statewide was 23 times greater than the city where residents were most negative about Durham. Knowing this helped isolate both causes and solutions that, when executed, helped Durham erase all but 11% of the negativity there while increasing the proportion who are positive by more than six times that amount.

Nationwide Durham’s favorability has never been a problem except when there is a threat of contamination from pockets of negativity or water-cooler folktales.

Durham’s net favorability nationwide is nearly 85% higher than the average for the 21 cities measured by Public Policy Polling but understandably the community is 24% less known and this is something where earned media or “publicity” is much better suited than advertising.

Durham’s negative rating nationwide is one-third the average of the Public Policy group and lower than any of the 21 measured.

Durham also has a much narrower favorability gap between genders and ethnic groups and I suspect the same would be true among those who live in metro vs. non-metro areas, although that was not measured in the Public Policy as far as I can tell.

There are three corollaries I learned during my decades grappling with community image:

Communities are never as popular with external audiences as they believe and only scientific public opinion research provides a reliable benchmark both from which to start and then to measure improvement.

When it comes to influencing community image, marketing can be a spearhead but some elements such as advertising and direct sales are far too blunt as instruments and lack credibility.

A third is that marketing as a tool to turn-around and promote image must be about much more than applying lipstick. It is a must to admit what must be improved while always putting it into perspective.

Lastly, turning around image isn’t for the faint of heart or about cloning or playing politics.

Clear Cutting Raleigh!

2012-05-07T07:27:00.001-04:00

Even though the only hearing on the matter occurred right there, Raleigh, North Carolina has seemed oblivious to the legislation that was rammed through the state legislature which led to regulations permitting outdoor bill companies to not only double the cut zone but “clear cut” with no requirement to be selective or to replant or to pay for the public property destroyed while, at the same time, ignoring local ordinances and values.

My guess is that a little hubris may be involved. Raleigh is accustomed to favored treatment as North Carolina’s capitol city such as the concentration of nearly every state museum and much better roadside maintenance from NCDOT. So residents in the City of Oaks may be incredulous to see what is captured by the images below.

No sensitivity was given to soil erosion, or the over-story needed to protect sensitive trees like dogwoods, which is the state tree after all, or to storm water retention, carbon sequestration, aesthetics or the state constitution or the wishes of 9 out of 10 North Carolinians.

All of this sacrificed just in case anyone is still unaware of Blue Bell Ice Cream. Dial 1-800-327-8135 and press 3 to tell Texas-based Blue Bell corporate offices to stop desecrating North Carolina communities such as Raleigh.

Calling the offending billboard company won’t do any good – they are out delivering campaign contributions to legislators. But you can click here to “like” Scenic NC on Facebook and stand up for North Carolina’s scenic character.

Infographic – Connecting Outrageous Dots In Two Minutes

2012-05-06T07:48:00.001-04:00

Click here to view this illustrated video on YouTube.

Infographic – What’s Wrong With Our Food System?

2012-05-05T07:40:00.001-04:00

If clicking on the image doesn’t bring up the entire inforgraphic by Oxfam, click here.

The Antidote To Billboards and Sprawl

2012-05-04T06:43:00.001-04:00

Something didn’t seem right in news stories about a poll last month by Harris Interactive reporting that only 27% of Americans describe themselves as environmentally-conscious, so I drilled down a bit.

A more accurate statement would be that only 12% report that being environmentally-conscious doesn’t describe them at all. Everyone else to a degree was environmentally-conscious, 28% somewhat, 33% fairly, 18% very and 9% completely.

Before we obsess too much about “12% who apparently don’t give a flip or possibly just own billboards, there has been an uptick since 2009 in the overall percentages which now show that 20% of Americans describe themselves as conservationists, green 17% or environmentalist 16%.

That may not seem large but by comparison it trumps the current popularity of the US Congress (10%) or the North Carolina General Assembly (18%) or Tea Party (12%.)

Illustrating why 79% of Americans yearn for far more and better coverage of the environment, a local city official recently stopped me in mid-sentence to ask me what I meant by the term “green infrastructure.” It wasn’t a trick question nor was it only because environmental consciousness has been brutally politicized.

What news coverage occurs about the environment (e.g. 1% of stories last year) has become politicized by a phenomenon described by co-authors of an op-ed last week in the Washington Post (one from a conservative think tank and the other from a progressive think tank):

“We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.

Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?”

By now all Americans, especially anyone working in government at every level but especially local, should understand that:

“…green infrastructure is the ecological framework needed for environmental, social and economic sustainability—in short it is our nation’s natural life sustaining system. Green infrastructure differs from conventional approaches to open space planning because it looks at conservation values and actions in concert with land development, growth management and built infrastructure planning.”

More specifically, as defined by the Green Infrastructure Work Group:

“Green infrastructure is our nation’s natural life support system — an interconnected network of waterways, wetlands, woodlands, wildlife habitats, and other natural areas; greenways, parks and other conservation lands; working farms, ranches and forests; and wilderness and other open spaces that support native species, maintain natural ecological processes, sustain air and water resources and contribute to the health and quality of life for America’s communities and people.”

That definition is strategic and overarching. Some have narrowed the term to be more tactical such as this guide the how to value green infrastructure for storm water management. Still others think of it only in terms of a “green roof” on a building. But I prefer the more all encompassing, strategic sense of the term.

“Green” infrastructure is every bit as crucial as what is called “gray” infrastructure such as utilities, roads, sidewalks and buildings. Just like social and cultural infrastructure, they require a careful balance.

As sense-of-place champion Edward T. McMahon co-wrote a decade ago, green infrastructure may be a new term to some but it is not a new idea, and because it balances conservation and development it differs from traditional open space planning.

A fascinating new book entitled American Canopy: Trees, Forests and the Making of a Nation by environmental lawyer Eric Rutkow explains historically that even before the founding of this country, people understood that sustainable development was enabled by a balance of infrastructures.

Development is far more sustainable and valuable when informed by holistic green infrastructure planning which includes a series of hubs and links throughout a community. Without it sprawl gnaws away at the character of a community. Without it inter and intra agency silos result in what we see in the North Carolina Department of Transportation.

Within NCDOT roadside environmental engineers carefully plant trees, turf and wildflowers and protect scenic by-ways for economic, health and aesthetic reasons, but maintenance is done by another department, which as we’ve seen recently along Interstates here, can be scalped and clear-cut or surrendered to private billboard companies even in violation of the department policies, federal guidelines and with no disregard for local regulations.

As documented in the 2004 book Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles and the American Landscape, by Dr. Catherine Gudis at the University of California – Riverside, sprawl did not begin after World War II. It began much earlier in the years after WWI and in the absence of zoning was fueled by the outdoor billboard industry which first desecrated downtown buildings and then wallpapered roadways as fast as they were built while fueling development that even today is many times what would be justified by the growth in population.

To me the antidote to sprawl and blight, such as billboards and unsustainable development and the desecration of community character, is more coherent infrastructure planning beginning with a development-balanced, overarching and strategic green infrastructure plan.

The Fiery Soldier For Sense of Place

2012-05-03T05:08:00.001-04:00

He walked unsteadily into the room using two canes but still with the grace of a former soldier. More than 30 years after I first began to benefit from his wisdom as a national sense-of-place reformer, I recently found myself meeting him face to face in a room that was immediately filled with his passion and his intellect.

I first became aware of Edward T. McMahon when I was just a decade into my now-concluded 40-year career in community-destination marketing and a little full of myself after receiving a 1982 CLIO Award in the television/cinema category as producer for the still evident Wild About Anchorage campaign which was created in part by Bob Kurtz who, by the way, gave me the nick name I use on Twitter, Topbull, as in the bull moose mascot “Seymour of Anchorage” which was part of the campaign.

Some jump to the plausible, but inaccurate, conclusion that the handle relates to my time as head of the community marketing agency for Durham which is known as “The Bull City,” but I had it long before I arrived here.

While sense-of-place was just emerging for me as a concept back then, it had always been in my subconscious approach to my work.

Back then Ed was teaching law and public policy at Georgetown University Law Center after earning a law degree there subsequent to receiving an M.A. in Urban Studies from the University of Alabama.

At the time, Charlie Floyd, a friend of mine now in North Carolina and Ed were part of a group resurrecting a national roadside reform movement much like the National Roadside Council had been from the 1920s-1960s. Initially it was called the Coalition for Scenic Beauty which morphed into Scenic America in 1989 just as I was arriving in Durham NC, where I still live, to jumpstart community marketing here.

Rivaled only by Dr. Scott Russell Sanders and his seminal essay entitled The Geography of Somewhere, Ed’s prolific writing, both when he worked at The Conservation Fund and also since 2004 at the Urban Land Institute where he currently holds the Charles E. Fraser Chair for Sustainable Development and Environmental Policy, has shaped my understanding of the central importance of sense-of-place.

When my friend Tania Dautlick recently turned me onto The Sustainable Cities Institute, I wasn’t at all surprised to see Ed on the advisory board there.

Favorite Edward T. McMahon essays of mine include his most recent entitled The Distinctive City where he poses the thought provoking question: “Do you want the character of your city to shape the new development, or do you want the new development to shape the character of the city?”

Another of my favorites of his is The Place Making Dividend which is filled with observations about the economic importance of being different such as “…many American communities are suffering the social, economic, and environmental consequences of being places that simply aren’t worth caring about. The more one place (one location) comes to be just like every other place, the less reason there is to visit or invest.”

Another is Lessons In Community Development Learned from Traveling where he writes “Travel teaches us that those communities that have retained their unique character are places that use vision, planning, and design to preserve the features that make them special. It also teaches us that progress does not demand degraded surroundings.”

In an essay entitled Tourism and the Environment, Ed put his finger on why sense of place is about so much more than facilities and activities when he writes, “… anyplace can create a tourist attraction, but it is those places that are attractions in and of themselves that people most want to visit.”

I feel so blessed to hold the many perspectives I learned from Ed and then to finally meet him in person and be able to tell him so. I credit him for much of the success I enjoyed in my career and and also for the passion I have as a roadside reformer in retirement.

If you are involved in community-destination marketing or you want the destination marketing organization in your community to assume its customary responsibility of serving as guardian of sense of place where you live, you can do no better than to relish and share this one last “Edism”:

“Place is more than just a location or a spot on a map. A sense of place is a unique collection of qualities and characteristics – visual, cultural, social, and environmental – that provides meaning to a location.

Sense of place is what makes one location (e.g., your hometown) different from another location (e.g., my hometown), but sense of place is also that which makes our physical surroundings worth caring about.”

Channeling O. Max Gardner

2012-05-02T06:57:00.001-04:00

He is the only person to have starred on both the NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill football teams and maybe that feat gave O. Max Gardner the foresight as Governor of North Carolina from 1929 to 1933 to combine the state’s public universities into a single system.

But, unlike many today in the legislature and at least one current Democratic candidate for Governor, Gardner was also a “roadside reformer,” famously advocating the use of highway funds to plant trees along roadsides as a “sound business investment” even during the Great Depression.

Governor Gardner envisioned North Carolina as a “tourism state” and commissioned a report on how to beautify its roadsides and curb blight such as billboards. The state was already earning a reputation for a great system of roadbeds but for roadsides, not so much.

Back then, where roadside trees hadn’t already been ravaged by poor road construction practices, they were being desecrated and destroyed or blighted by outdoor billboards.

A statewide survey commissioned in 1930 and co-conducted by a highway engineer reported a billboard every half mile on the road between Durham, where I live now, and Raleigh; and where trees hadn’t been stripped away for nearly 350 of these monstrosities, they were cut down or obscured to reveal hundreds more signs wallpapering barns, tobacco buildings and filling stations.

Back then Old (State) Route 10, a fragment of which I now often enjoy riding my Harley Crossbones, was the first central highway through the state and known as the “Main Street of North Carolina” in the years before it was soon replaced by US 70.

Finally paved end to end, there were already more than 2,500 billboards along the 383 miles of State Route 10 from Beaufort on the coast to Asheville in the mountains or as the report notes, “one every 13 1/2 seconds” even at the 35-45 mile per hour speeds permitted in 1930.

Gateways into Charlotte and Asheville, at the time, featured an outdoor billboard every 4 1/2 seconds and 5 seconds respectively. Then as now, both the public and companies led by Standard Oil were rebelling against the exploitation and degradation of publicly-owned roadsides.

Standard Oil was sponsoring essay contests across the nation the year North Carolina roadsides were being surveyed, entitled “Scen-ic,” a pejorative word-play on the word scenic. Billboards had already become the butt of editorial cartoonists.

The essays generated ideas on how to end the erection of “objectionable advertising signs along highways” and “why signs that obscured scenic beauty should be removed.”

Many generated photographs and slogans such as “Why Sign Away Beauty,” “A Sign Removed is a Scene Improved,” “Landmarks – Not Trademarks,” and “Roadside Beauty – A Roadside Duty.”

Today, trees are once again fair game in North Carolina:

The legislature is permitting outdoor billboard companies to clear cut nearly the length of a football field in either direction while overriding local restrictions, thanks to a bill ramrodded through by a Republican lawmaker who owns billboards and seems to have been given a free pass when it comes to ethics, helping to earn the state only a “C” for integrity.

Co-dependent NCDOT maintenance crews, except where public outrage made them stop, have been illegally slashing the tree line along Interstates, ten feet further than policy and up to 100 feet up some hillsides, sacrificing hardwood trees that were just as large when the roads were built and using public funds to cut down redbuds and dogwoods that had been planted in the tree line at public expense. (And you wonder why some people want to shrink government?)

NCDOT officials have also been blowing off local officials with claims the agency doesn’t recognize local zoning, local tree ordinances or local water standards.

And finally, Lt. Governor and now candidate for Governor, Walter Dalton, long one of the largest beneficiaries of campaign contributions from billboard interests and who proudly sponsored legislation to deny local communities use of amortization as a tool to remove billboards, now writes that he “understands their value to our economy?”

Apparently he isn’t yet plugged into the 9 out of 10 North Carolinians who oppose cutting any more trees for billboards and considers trading trees for billboards good for tourism, now one of the state’s largest economic sectors.

Governor Gardner lost his first bid for Governor in 1920 to Cameron Morrison (because he stood up for voting rights for women and Blacks) but was successful when he ran again in 1928 and after he was sworn into office in 1929 was famously quoted in the Raleigh News And Observer as saying:

"They expect you to kiss the ass of everybody in North Carolina with the understanding that when you become governor, they will all have to kiss yours.

My problem has always been that I only kiss my wife, my children and my dogs and I have never let any living soul kiss my ass.”

I don’t know Lt. Governor Dalton and he seems honorable but he’s apparently no Governor O. Max Gardner.

Engaging The Soul That Empowers Sense Of Place

2012-05-01T05:09:00.001-04:00

It was an honor to finally meet and speak briefly with Marc Gobé!

Ironically, living and working in Durham, North Carolina I learned one of his most important lessons on branding 7 or 8 years before he coined it as a “best practice” and a decade before he was to write the seminal book which was updated and revised as Emotional Branding 2.0 just as I was retiring a couple of years ago.

When I arrived in Durham in 1989 to jumpstart the organization responsible for being the “heart, soul, and energy of the community as a destination” and “defender of it’s image and brand” as well as “guardian of its unique sense of place” – Durham was soon to receive recognition as “the city with a soul.”

While all of my previous decades of experience at community marketing and branding involved engaging the head, as nearly all marketing did until it was revolutionized by Marc, I turned out to be a good match for a community with already unparalleled levels of community pride and passion.

Marc Gobe’s brilliant contribution to branding a few years later was was to point out that a brand or product personality (in my expertise, a community) must engage not only the head but the heart and the soul.

Durham at the time I arrived was and had always been big on heart and soul, but these were masked by both unpretentiousness and double-density press coverage which our market intelligence revealed was fueled by incredible levels of negative word of mouth among residents of nearby communities.

So I was able to skip the much harder job of generating community pride and do what I could do best: give that existing pride and passion voice by empowering residents with facts and information, often in the form of statistics and then working systematically to facing down inaccuracies point by point and day by day.

From day one, a couple of people who should have been helping out were critical instead, criticizing the amount of research it took to empower residents and correct inaccuracies even undermining me by “carrying water” for a few in nearby Raleigh who were threatened by our efforts to calmly address what were affectionately termed “water-cooler” myths.

Ironically, even the few trying to undermine the effort were always among the first to call for data to overcome misinformation that was tripping up consultants, threatening loans, dissuading tenants and home buyers or undermining credit ratings or reappraisals.

I smile when, ironically, one of those naysayers will now and then try to claim credit for the turn-around.

While meetings with consultants and appraisers and loan officers often took much of my time, legions of residents empowered now with information to speak up around the water-cooler, created what Marc terms “social voice” both before and after the term social media and related technology became widely available.

They deserve the credit!

Together, we cleared away the clouds of neighboring negativity that were obscuring Durham’s unparalleled but always unpretentious sense of community pride and passion and replaced it with positive word of mouth that in turn has fueled a resurgence that has made things possible that are far more tangible.

In 2005, using a template that Marc Gobé espoused four years earlier in the 1.0 edition of Emotional Branding and a two-year process brilliantly executed by city brand thought- leader Bill Baker and his team, Durham was able to distill an overarching Durham brand anchored in its soulful and temporal values and personality traits.

Adopted in various forms now by nearly 400 disparate Durham stakeholder organizations and in hundreds of thousands of applications, the overarching Durham brand thrives because it engages head, heart and soul.

Marc is a legend among marketers for many reasons the least of which is not only because he co-founded and built up what was known then as Desgrippes Gobé into one of the top five branding firms globally after coming to the United States as a 24 year old immigrant.

He is even more of a legend now because his understanding and passion are focused on promoting the concept that in order for product brands to have a soul, they must be good stewards of the environment and embrace sustainability as more than a buzz word.

He is also one of a growing number of marketers with the courage to once again speak out against the desecration created by huge outdoor billboards that scar roadsides, clear cut green infrastructure and blight communities. Here Marc stands on the shoulders of Mad Men giants such as Ogilvy and Gossage.

To inform others and engage their head, heart and soul about the desecration wrought by the outdoor billboard advertising industry, Marc personally financed an incredible documentary that is being screened around the country called This Space Available.

A Stewardship Credit On Taxes

2012-04-30T10:27:00.001-04:00

Ironically, I recently found myself in a conference room at the headquarters of the National Historic Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington D.C. within 40 hours of having witnessed Durham, North Carolina's Annual Tribute Luncheon last week in Bay 7 of the incredible American Tobacco Complex.

While placemaking is about much more than buildings, using several metrics, arguably no place has taken better advantage than Durham of their share of the $90 billion in federal historic tax credits that have been injected into local economies over the last 32 years to help invigorate the built environment’s contribution to sense of place across the country.

Of course, the Trust which was established back when I was born, is about much more than buildings just as “protecting and preserving scenic character,” the purpose for which I was visiting Trust headquarters is about much more than preserving trees or fighting things like outdoor billboards that blight scenic character along roadways and destroy sense of place in communities.

The Brookings Institution which is located just one building further down Massachusetts Avenue from the Trust estimates that between the time when the American Tobacco factories reopened in 2004 as a creative class center and 2030, 82 billion square feet of existing buildings in this nation will be demolished and replaced with new construction, fully 25% of the nation’s current building stock.

The projections have been slowed slightly by the Great Recession, but there appears to be little or no evidence that we’ve learned our collective lesson from the burst of the housing and commercial real estate bubble.

Hopefully, the rapid and broad-based embrace of sustainability as an American value will be enough to slow the churn and transform the ways we see land use and respond to growth as we understand how to incorporate both negative and positive externalities into free market decisions.

But every year, approximately 1 billion square feet of buildings are demolished and replaced with new construction even though buildings built prior to 1945 are far more energy efficient.

A few years ago, a good friend of mine who lives down in Raleigh, North Carolina confided that Wake County which includes a dozen or so separate communities there was burning an acre an hour in development which seemed to me far too fast to enable good land use decisions.

By 2030 84% of the built landscape in the South will have been constructed or adaptively reused and, 54% will be new construction built since the year 2000. If we insist that new construction carry the true cost, maybe we can make growth far more sustainable while being better stewards of historic structures.

Until new development carries its true cost, it is crucial that Congress level the playing field by passing the “Creating American Prosperity Through Preservation Act” CAPP) which was introduced in February by Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland and Senator Olympia Snowe, a Republican from Maine to invigorate tax credits.

The CAPP Act will:

Drive development and job creation into smaller “Main Street” communities by increasing the tax credit amount to 30% for projects under $5 million.
Promote energy-efficiency and cost-savings by encouraging the use of energy efficient technologies.
Enhance the impact of the historic tax credit in low-income areas by eliminating barriers to nonprofit community-based developers.
Expand the 10% credit for the rehabilitation of non-historic buildings to include structures “fifty years or older.”
Improve to efficiency of state tax credits by eliminating the federal taxation of the state credits.

Fast Company writing, in part, this month about Durham’s adaptive reuse of several million feet of the city’s historic tobacco and textile factories using historic tax credits notes:

“One hundred fifty years ago, Durham-based entrepreneurs Washington Duke and W.T. Blackwell battled for tobacco sovereignty...Today, Durham’s innovation scene is kindled by tech giants like IBM, Lenovo, and about 140 other companies with stakes in the ground at the 7,000-acre Research Triangle Park...

Though Big Tobacco’s heyday has come and gone, Durham, you could say, is still smoking!"

Infographic - US Population by Ancestry

2012-04-29T07:52:00.001-04:00

Tracking Down Happiness

2012-04-26T06:43:00.001-04:00

I know it isn’t true but I like to believe that everyone’s memories of when they were the age of my grandsons, 6 and 8, are some of the happiest of their lives, as were mine.

The happiness about which I speak is more “what psychologists call a trait, not a state – a person’s typical emotional experience, not fleeting responses to events” as described by Dr. Richard J. Davidson in his new book The Emotional Life of Your Brain, co-authored with Sharon Begley.

Unfortunately, when I was the age of my grandsons back in the 1950s, happiness, as it has been scientifically measured from year to year across the entire population, peaked in America. That’s a tidbit from The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being, by former Harvard University president Derek Bok.

In an effort to really put today’s headlines about disparity in context though, I go back 100 years.

During the declining years of President Theodore Roosevelt’s life, a statistician at the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Willford Isbell King published a fascinating retrospective entitled The Wealth and Income of the People of the United States.

In part, Dr. King analyzed statistics available in 1913. This was the year after the “anti-trust-enforcing” President lost a third-party bid to regain the White House. It was the latter part of what we now call The Progressive Era.

It was also in the wake of the Gilded Age of super-rich such as Rockefeller, Mellon, Carnegie, Flagler, Rogers, Morgan, Vanderbilt , Astor and Duke. It also marked the end of a 60 year period of natural devastation in America including two-thirds of the deforestation that has taken place over the last 400 years.

Dr. King computed back then that the richest 1 percent accounted for 18 percent of the nation's income. Today, the richest 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation's income, according to Timothy Noah, author of The Great Divergence.

Noah and Matt Yglesias have conducted a insightful multi-part virtual dialogue this week on Slate about why we should care about the divergence.

I’m intrigued by why we seemed happier in the 1950s according to scientific measures. Coming out of the Great Depression and WWII, we shared a sense of common purpose and we didn’t mind paying higher taxes in exchange for the common good and policies not for the wealth and big business as they do today but out of determination to grow the middle class.

I get that. I also understand and agree with the TED speech Tuesday by Harvard conducted that reveal that money per se doesn’t bring happiness but it is closely associated with using it to help others.

We seem to have replaced the incessant debate about “nature” or “nurture” that was so prevalent back when I went to college in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s with one today about whether growing gaps in equality between groups are driven by “economics” or a break-down of “culture.”

It is hard to argue with author Richard Heinberg, who wrote The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality when he blogged about Bok’s book, wondering why our overall happiness has declined while:

“During the past 35 years, per capita income has grown almost 60 percent, the average new home has become 50 percent larger, the number of cars has ballooned by 120 million, and the proportion of families owning personal computers has gone from zero to 80 percent.”

I also understand and accept in part the premise of Charles Murray’s recent book Coming Apart which points to cultural issues.

But these two choices are far too blunt to provide a lens through which to understand what we do going forward. I became a devote of the late James Q. Wilson when asked in the mid-1990s by the Durham Crime Cabinet to report on his then well-proven Broken Windows approach to reducing and curbing criminal behavior.

Today, nearly every community dabbles at an aspect or two of the Broken Windows theory, as Durham does, but those who have adopted it as an overarching strategy understand what Wilson grasped, that some social ills, such as crime, are not just individual choices but what columnist David Brooks terms as part of a “social psychology.”

I highly recommend a reading of Wilson’s 1985 14-page essay The Rediscovery of Character: Private Virtue and Public Policy. Viewed through the retrospective of someone like Wilson who had passionately advocated for pieces of our social safety net provides a much clearer view that the solution is probably both/and not either/or.

Drilling Down Into The News Dilemma About The Environment

2012-04-25T06:42:00.001-04:00

I find it odd that so many people believe that Southerners and Blacks in particular aren’t concerned about the environment. This seems to be insinuated in news coverage of the current debate over whether or not to permit “fracking” in North Carolina.

By holding out the false promise of jobs, proponents demonstrate that they seem to believe that African Americans will automatically dismiss deep concern for clean air and drinking water.

I wouldn’t be so sure. African Americans, particularly in the south, have been sensitized for more than 140 years to those who offer such a false choice.

Judging by the results of a recent national public opinion poll showing that 79% of Americans yearn for more and better news coverage of the environment, you can assume the concern is shared across all regions and ethnicities.

A closer look at the detailed results of this poll conducted for the Project For Improved Environmental Coverage by Opinion Research Corporation shows that Southerners at 83% and Blacks at 88% are even more likely to hold the view that news coverage of the environment should be improved.

All of this may be wishful thinking.

Journalism has shed more than 50,000 jobs in the US in recent years. Newspaper newsroom staffing peaked more than two decades ago and has fallen to levels last seen in the 1970s during Watergate, back when concern for the environment had just entered its twenty-year era of “pollution control”.

News coverage of the environment dropped last year to 1% of all news stories, about what celebrities receive. It was just a decade ago according to a 2008 study, Environment Reporters and U.S. Journalists: A Comparative Analysis, that 37% of daily newspapers and 10% of television stations had environmental reporters.

Over the last two decades the number of papers across the nation with even a science section fell 87% to fewer than 20 according to the San Jose Mercury News. A 2010 George Mason poll of local television news directors reveals the disconnect with the public’s desire for more coverage of the environment:

10% have a full-time science or environment reporter
Only half cover climate change one or more times a month
6 out of 10 even cover air and water quality 1 or 2 times a month or less
More than 89% believe coverage must reflect balanced viewpoints (even if some are inaccurate or deliberately misleading)
Yet more than 7 out of 10 believe citizens should do more to address global warming
More than half believe they need little or no additional information in order to form an opinion
73% were male, nearly 70% over the age of 40 and rounded 25% were conservative, 19% liberal and 57% moderate

I’m fortunate to live in a media viewing area with very competitive local television news, as “local” as you can call coverage spanning 22 counties. Incredibly, WRAL, a station based in nearby Raleigh is owned and now managed by the fourth generation of its founding family.

Showing the Goodmon family’s commitment to local news and information as well as social justice and the public interest, the station’s management recently cancelled lucrative prime-time programming to air the documentary 6,149 days, the true story of Greg Taylor about the first person to be freed from prison after the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission became involved in his case.

Considering the fact that there are now 520 local television stations that air no local news at all makes WRAL’s stance and coverage where I live in general very unusual. There are many other stations in this country that broadcast less than 30 minutes of news a day resulting in the fact that a full third of the country is without local television news.

Making it even more difficult for viewers to see through unreliable information in the guise of being “balanced coverage” is the fact that some stations are moving to “pay-to-play” models with no vetting of content for accuracy or agenda.

Only a third of the country receives local cable news or all-news local radio programming, as infuriating and obnoxious as it can be when it is so slanted as the 50,000 watt am station is that beams from Raleigh into Durham where I live.

Technology is unbundling traditional news models which will make it even more difficult for media to justify coverage of the environment especially even in the fewer of than 1% of cities such as Durham where I live which has both a local newspaper and competition-coverage from one based in a city nearby, neither independently owned.

In 1920 nearly 43% of all cities had dual press coverage but today the competition doesn’t result in better coverage, just dilution of resources. Paid circulation of daily newspapers is less today than when I was born nearly 64 years ago, four years after publication of a book entitled The Disappearing Daily.

But when I moved to Durham in 1989, newspapers nationwide employed more newsroom journalists than at anytime since I was ten years old; and now we’ve seen annual editorial budgets slashed by nearly $2 billion just since 2006.

News today may be 24/7 but it is staffed by far fewer journalists so the reality is less diversity of stories, repetitive programming, little in-depth or investigative reporting, ubiquitous feeding frenzies and “hamsterized” newsrooms.

So the public may want and even deserve more news coverage of the environment, but it is going to have to get it from non-traditional sources.

In the meantime we live in an era where politicians at the state level are increasingly less transparent and working hard to eliminate not only local control of environmental decisions but to exempt critical information about the environment from public records laws.

The idea of “breaking news” or “news bulletins” or “news flashes” was codified by the Associated Press more than 106 years ago according to Slate journalist David Wigel.

Today and in the future, we may be more likely to sense breaking news about the environment more from the air we breathe, the rapidly changing climate and the water we drink.

Our Fortunate Mistake

2012-04-24T06:54:00.001-04:00

Shortly after I arrived in North Carolina in 1989 for the concluding chapter in what would eventually be a 40-year career in community-destination marketing, Dana Clark’s six years in that field was just ending.

After earning an MBA at the University of Georgia, he had gone to work in group sales for the destination marketing organization in Charlotte, but over that span of six years he came to realize he was a mismatch, classifying himself as an “introverted marketing guy in a position that called for an extroverted politician.”

He was very good at booking business but he was soon to learn that destinations that fail to insulate their community marketing from cutthroat politics, as far too many do, can find their good work trumped by as little as two or three relentless and self-serving “enemies,” usually fronting for special interests.

An excuse came along, thanks in my opinion to a borderline breach of ethics by another DMO, and Dana was fired.

That mistake turned out to be extremely fortunate for tourism in North Carolina including destination marketing!

Clark continued his education at Virginia Tech and, while successfully completing a dissertation for a PhD, he started teaching at Appalachian State University in 1991 where he has remained ever since while consulting and assisting many professionals across the state including me.

With roots going back to the end of the 19th century, Appalachian State with a student enrollment of ore than 17,000 is located in the spectacular nook of northwest North Carolina framed by Tennessee and Virginia and a stones throw from Kentucky and West Virginia.

You can climb to the top of Beech Mountain near the campus and, if the atmosphere permitted, you would be able to see clear to the Rocky Mountains.

Dr. Clark, as Dana became known in 1993, has helped shape and direct what is arguably one of the most dynamic hospitality and tourism programs in the country as part of the Walker College of Business at ASU.

App’s was one of the original three programs of this type in North Carolina but that number has mushroomed to eight, including one in Durham where I live, as tourism has exploded into one of the state’s largest economic sectors over the last 20 plus years, the majority now driven by tourism drawn by communities.

Programs such as Dana’s are rigorous and many students wash out. But key to the incredible popularity of North Carolina and its cities, towns and counties has been the simultaneous evolution of a talented and educated workforce as well as a corps of entrepreneurs.

They thrive not only in destination marketing organizations but in tourism-related industries such as events, attractions, retail, lodging, restaurants and transportation. I came across or worked with many ASU alumni during my now concluded career.

Dr. Clark could run any DMO in the land, but we’re all much improved and far better off because he found his passion in education.

It Doesn’t Have To Be This Controversial

2012-04-23T07:48:00.001-04:00

To make the best decisions regarding a special tax levy to fund projects as proposed by and for Downtown Durham Inc., all the Durham City Council needs to do is ask the right people and take steps first to establish a baseline. It is that uncomplicated.

The right people are not only property owners but tenants and residents including apartment dwellers. Lobbying and special interests, even those with a legacy of playing win/lose hard ball politics, may be useful resources but biased by nature and rarely are their opinions generalizable.

A simple but scientifically randomized intercept survey can quickly and easily inform the best possible decision, possibly coupled with a carefully controlled online survey and could quickly implemented by using City staff and volunteers such as Durham Wayfinders. Any incidental costs could be reimbursed if/when the special levy is activated.

Even better, questions on the survey could drill down about how to help cut or prioritize costs, e.g. how many are willing to pay extra for sidewalk scrubbing and clean up vs. lobbying and marketing etc. Many communities such as Seattle, for example, use scientific intercepts to gauge the needs of districts including, but never limited to, just their downtown areas.

Such a survey could also help identify preferences for how the use of the special assessment should be governed.

For example, should this be done by a completely private organization with a self-appointed board as DDI has traditionally operated or by a quasi-independent authority possibly staffed by DDI but with publicly-appointed seats balanced to represent property owners, tenants and residents or perhaps even a conversion of the DDI model into a hybrid, etc.

Whatever is decided even if it isn’t based on an independent survey of stakeholders, I agree with DDI exec Bill Kalkhof who reportedly believes that general taxpayers should not be put on the hook -- any more than they already have been to fund special services or special treatment for just Downtown.

Regardless of what is decided about a special levy on Downtown, it won’t make a dent in overall resident perceptions of community aesthetics in general, one of three top drivers of community attachment.

While Durham residents rate the community much higher than the benchmarks overall, they rate it four times lower than the benchmark for aesthetics. This includes giving current maintenance of roadsides and medians a failing grade by three to one.

This discontent isn’t just about the presence of litter as some more interested in hardscape claim as they dismiss this negative ratings. Neglect such as this is linked in study after study to crime, property values, public health outcomes, economic development decisions, intolerance and abuse and more.

Durham officials need look no further than southeast Durham encompassing Research Triangle Park or the adjacent airport which is jointly-owned with Raleigh and Wake County to rediscover the best practices for overall aesthetics.

In fact, it might allay some of the widespread and growing opposition to the special levy on Downtown if the affected parties could first see overall Durham maintenance restored to appropriate levels as a guarantee that the special assessment on Downtown would truly provide services only above and beyond.

Hopefully officials will soon take a broader view of aesthetics and will address neglect in Downtown as well as community-wide.

Infographic – If Walmart Was A Country

2012-04-22T07:26:00.001-04:00

If clicking on the image didn’t open to the story with the full series of charts, click here to open see them on Mother Jones .