The Fallacy of Trading Sense of Place for Density

In May of 1989 I accepted an offer to relocate to Durham, North Carolina and jumpstart the community’s destination marketing organization.

It was clear during my interview visit that Durham had good bones as well as deeply held traits and values that would be appealing visitors.

By good bones, I mean that many of its indigenous, core commercial districts retained the smaller, people scale, historical blocks of buildings that a majority of travelers are drawn to because they reflect a distinctive sense of place.

This is the “there” there of a particular place that so very many places long ago surrendered. 

It is a term that was coined in the 1930s by Gertrude Stein that over time has come to describe anywhere that “sense of character or coherence has eroded,” as so eloquently noted by Scott Russell Sanders in his essay The Geography of Somewhere.

Of course there is a lot more to having a “there” there than just architectural setting.

It was also clear back then that Durham had given in every now and then to the temptation during the 80s to throw up a skyscraper or two, as it is currently doing.

But different than those prior to WWII, apparently both developers and local officials (as illustrated by their own buildings) have forgotten a crucial tenet noted by Witold Rybczyski in How Architecture Works.

New buildings, according to Rybcyski (Rib-chin-ski,) a noted architect, professor, critic and author, should foremost seek coherence with place and setting.

When I mentioned a need for “coherence” to an official during deliberations for this newest and tallest building underway in Durham, I received only a look of bewilderment and something mumbled about the need for density.

More on density that later but studies show that, too, is a fallacy when used as a justification for towering structures that violate sense of place.

At year-end I will be seven years retired from that career, but last week the staff there invited me a personal tour of the new headquarters for the organization I led for 21 years in Durham.

Including the ground floor Durham Visitor Info Center, it occupies the first two floors of the six story 1905 Trust Building, Durham’s first skyscraper and one perfectly coherent with place.

It was the tallest building in the state when it was erected.  It also had the first elevator in Durham and was a little more than twice the height of surrounding buildings.

There is no record of controversy at the time but there is evidence three years later when the 47-story Singer Building opened in New York as the tallest building in the world that these structures were taking a toll on sense of place.

For several decades people had complained of the canyons these buildings created, along with the wind tunnel effect and the deep shadows they cast shortening the amount of daylight for blocks in at a time.

Now, 100 years after Jane Jacobs published launched a conversation in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a new study across a wide range of metrics finds that blocks of older, smaller builders perform better than districts with larger, newer structures.

By comparison, these blocks generate more jobs per square foot, a greater diversity of businesses, more non-chain local businesses, more small business vitality and greater density, more character, walkability and a broader socio-economic residential mix.

The answer isn’t either/or.  It is about mix, fit and especially coherence.

Communities that have surrendered to forces who told them they had to sell out their sense of place in order to be major league still have pockets or fragments they can salvage.

Communities such as Durham that turned the corner with sense of place in tact but may be unprepared for how quickly out of town “buyer/flippers” as well as franchise architecture developer/lenders can hollow out sense of place.

They may need to shift gears even more quickly.

Reading this study is a good start.   Begin by dissuading planners and officials of any notion that coherence of place must be sacrificed for density.

Taking Up The Slack

In case you missed it, North Carolina where I have lived for going on three decades just missed ranking in the top 10 states for couch potatoes.

We came in #6 for average minutes watching TV, just below the middle of the pack for least amount of exercise, #11 for watching daytime soap operas and, drum roll, #14 for love of Lazy-E-Boys.

As a whole, Tar Heels are #15 when it comes to thinking about frozen pizza and #19 in our love of fast food, but in the middle of the pack again in our love of video games.

That is just a sampling of the metrics used to develop the Couch Potato index.

Regionally, according to Roberto Ferman, a reporter for Wonkblog, the South dominates the nation when it comes to Couch Potatoes.

It’s probably the humidity but that doesn’t explain why we don’t make up for it during mild winters.

North Carolina comes in #15 overall in the analysis compiled from various sources by bloggers for Estately, an online real estate research site.

Most fascinating to me was the variation across the country in the number of fast food restaurants per capita and the linkages to measures for Lazy-E-Boys, obesity and lack of exercise.

For many years I ate, on average, more than a hamburger per day, especially after moving to North Carolina, so it was no wonder then when my doctor told me I needed to lose 20-30 pounds as part of a regimen to lower my triglycerides.

I’ve eaten three hamburgers in the past year, two when traveling.  In the mean time, the number ordered per American has reached 28 compared to the nearly 550 a year I used to contribute alone.

The Burgers “ordered-in-restaurants” market is double the size of the market for pizzas, which is why it was smart of the index to include frozen pizzas.

A few years before I retired in 2009, Durham, where I live, jumped into the “better-burger movement,” led by a great restaurant that existed here at the time called Starlu.

It, in turn, helped spawn an early food truck called Only Burger, now also a sit-down or order-to-go restaurant with two locations.

At the time, better burgers were less than 2% of the overall restaurant burger market.  Now, they are double that share even though the overall market for burgers in restaurants has grown by another $13.4 billion.

Obviously someone is take up my slack.

A 150 Year Old Tension

Brown University sociologist Dr. Hilary Levey Friedman traces the evolution of after-school sports to the mandatory schooling movement which took effect state-by-state between 1852 and 1917.

The theory is that compulsory schooling brought the concept of leisure time into focus, delineating school time from free time.

That surely was an accelerant, but in New York, where it didn’t take effect until 1874, the struggle over what to do with free time was apparent in the competing 1860 proposals for Central Park.

Olmsted and Vaux, especially the former, both of whom were selected envisioned the park as a respite from city life; a source for the soul’s replenishment, according to Justin Martin in his excellent biography of Olmsted entitled, Genius of Place.

Their bitter rivals, a politician and a banker, envisioned the park as a place of promenades, amusements and sports.  For decades after its completion, a few New Yorkers relentlessly pushed to undermine the park with forms of recreation for the frenetic.

Olmsted’s vision won out, in part, due to strong editorial support from two major newspapers including his recent employer, The New York Times, while his rivals pushed their vision of hyper-activity by buying huge advertorials in a third newspaper.

However, across the country, this struggle is still playing out today between those who see the value of unstructured play in nature and those who seek to populate parks instead with amusements, theme parks, playgrounds, athletic fields and festivals.

It is the story possibly of introverts vs. extroverts, reflection vs. “ants in your pants,” stayers vs. boomers, as well as those who value preservation vs. exploitation, see vegetation as green infrastructure vs. purely aesthetic, and seek retain sense of place rather than surrender to mainstream generica.

Gradually, over the last 150 years, the notation of recreation was estranged from nature.

My native state of Idaho made education mandatory in 1887, while still a territory, while North Carolina where I have lived longer than any other state waited until 1907.

My father, who was born on the same ancestral Idaho cattle and horse ranch as I was defied the theories linking sports to leisure.

Born in 1922, a fourth generation Idahoan and rancher, he walked or rode a horse first to a two-room school house his grandparents and parents had forged when they homesteaded.

A year before entering high school he began to walk or ride a horse across the Henry’s Fork the four miles to Ashton, the nearest town.  There he played sports both for school and church teams but it was from passion, not for leisure.

From age 15, when his father first experienced heart problems, Dad ran the ranch by himself as well as attending school and playing on four sports teams including baseball, basketball, football and track and field.

On Saturdays, he begin going snow skiing at Bear Gulch just as soon as it opened in 1939, ten miles northeast of Ashton, more than forty years before Grand Targhee would open near there.

By then he was probably driving his parents Whippet sedan or an old truck.

Some rudimentary ski areas had begun to spring up in the western part of the state a few years earlier and Sun Valley had brought national attention to the sport when it opened at the end of 1936.

Still, he had to feed the livestock and milk cows before going skiing on weekends.  Dad played church ball well into his forties, water skied into his 60s and snow skied into his 70s when he no longer had to pay for a lift ticket.

He was a testament that sports can be much more than leisure.

Snow skiing by the way dates clear back to 4,000 B.C., about the time of the Pyramids.  It was used for work or transportation.  Before Olmstead’s creation of Central Park, hoards of California gold rush ‘49ers learned to ski and races were taking place in the 1860s.

That’s about the time that school sports became a tool to help immigrants and poor children learn the so-called “American” values of “cooperation, hard work and respect for authority”, according to Friedman.

She is also the author of Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture, which deals with all after school activities.

During the Progressive Era, public school athletic leagues began popping up in New York City followed within seven years by 17 other cities.  Friedman explains that “settlement houses and ethnic clubs followed suit.

“Pay-to-play” organizations, such as Pop Warner Football and Little League Baseball began popping up in the East by the late 1920s and 1930s when my dad, out West in rural Idaho, found sports through school and church.

Today, organized sports has become more the province of middle and upper class kids, especially at what is called the travel competition level with parents hoping, in part, that it will improve college applications or possibly their retirement.

However, schools, according to Friedman, gradually began to de-emphasize sports beginning in the 1930s because educators saw the ugly side of competition.

It is a view Friedman thinks became mainstream in the 1960s with the “self-esteem” movement still very much with us today when we see some sports leagues for young children pretend that both teams won the game.

However, an unforeseen side effect was flip flopping sports after WWII from a tool for the masses to one for the privileged or talented.

According to a poll this month by Harvard and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, my dad would also be an outlier today.

The report entitled, Sports And Health In America has been in the news this week but warrants much more than a sound bite. Sports took off during the Progressive Era, not as amusement or recreation but when it became fused with health.

Participation in sports drops off dramatically after age 25.  While three in four of us say we played sports when we were younger, only one in four do so as adults and again that strongly associated with higher income.

Even so, because there is some machismo involved, I suspect the ratio may be even lower.

Another survey by the CDC calculated in 2011 that only 18.3% of adults in North Carolina, where I live, met the guideline of 2.5 hours of moderate-intensity aerobic activity weekly and muscle strengthening activity at least twice a week.

Click here for a detailed national and state-by-state breakdown.

Kids aren’t given much time in nature or unstructured play these days, in part, because parents hope their children will become a professional athletes.

Some now even “red-shirt” their kids as early as pre-school in hopes it will later give them a physical advantage over classmates.

In a Boston Globe article entitled, How parents are ruining youth sports, Jay Atkinson cites a study in a sports medicine journal noting that out of the 45 million school age children playing at least one organized sport, as many as 80% will have quit by age 15.

One reason he notes is “the gap between a child’s desire to have fun and the misguided notion among some adults that their kids’ games are a miniature version of grow-up competitions, where the goal is to win.”

This premise that their kids will become professional athletes is held by 26% of parents whose children play high school sports, including 44% of those with a high school education or less and 39% of those whose household income is $50,000 or less.

In his new book Cultural Matrix, Harvard sociologist Dr. Orlando Patterson refers to studies that support what he calls:

“one of the cruelest sociological hoaxes played upon black youth from the beginning of their integration into popular culture at the middle of the twentieth century…”

[This] “the myth that replaced the old “credit to your race” indignity, namely that participation in sports and the popular arts offer significant employment opportunities and mobility out of the ghetto.”

Patterson cites computations that of all the black male high school students currently between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, including those whom he calls “dreamers, the odds of becoming a professional athlete are 1 in 15,764.

He concludes with statistics that their odds of being killed in a traffic accident are three times higher than becoming a professional basketball player and they are 5,238 times more likely at some time in his life of going to prison.

At the end of his article in the Globe, Atkinson, a former athlete who works with children in sports, notes that:

“This summer, encourage your children to go fishing, play mini golf, and invite their pals to shoot hoops in the driveway. Have them visit the library, and loaf around in the backyard chewing on blades of grass. And keep in mind that the interior experience of playing a sport, the beauty and the joy of it, is sovereign territory and belongs to the kids themselves.”

Golf, a sport that many see as in decline now, rises as the sport of choice among Americans at age 50 but experts on NPR notes that two-thirds of golf played in the U.S. is done using motorized carts, required primarily due to their becoming a revenue center for courses.

Golfers who walk the course average 5 miles but when using a cart this falls to a mile or less. Experts suggest an average of 6,000 steps (3 miles) a day to improve health and 10,000 a day to lose weight.

I don’t golf but I average over 7,700 steps a day, some weeks as much as 9,000, in part, by religiously walking more than two miles each morning.

It takes 48 minutes at a fast clip of 4 mph for a 150 lb. woman to burn off a donut (240 calories.)  It takes walking an hour and forty-eight minutes to burn off a Big Mac and compensating for eating just one M&M takes walking the length of a football field.

It goes without saying that for me at least walking also makes you far more conscious about what you eat.

Studies show that walking a mile in 15 minutes, which even for me is motivated walking, burns the same amount of calories with far less wear and tear to my knees and hips as jogging that distance in 8.5 minutes.

But exercise and sports have different motivations.  About 60% of adults play sports for enjoyment or competition, while 71% exercise for health-related reasons.

The sweet spot for me at my age (almost 67) is to do both. I walk while enjoying nature seven days a week and lift weights twice a week.

I think Olmsted had it right.

The Value of Fostering Early Memories

In the image in this essay, I am holding my middle sister who was born two years and ten months after me.

For three and a half years, it would be just the two of us.  I was three years and 10 months old when that family photo was taken.

It had become separated from thousand of other family photos and resurfaced in a box my mother left for me to organize in January when she died.

Nine months before my first sister was born, when I was two, my parents had very briefly separated.

All but four memories from before I was five or six, which is when my second sister came home, faded away because, as researchers have learned, before that age we really haven’t developed the capacity to retain them.

That’s why we are rarely able to recall memories of events before the age of three or four.

The three I can recall are flashes that were later filled in by my parents.

One is from around when that photo was taken at 3 years, 10 months when I recall being thrown over my dad’s shoulder while being carried into the house late one night after returning home from visiting our grandparents.

Another is when I was three and a half being pulled on a makeshift sled behind my parents who were on snowshoeing up to play cards one night with friends.

The third flash I recall from that period is when I was four and riding between my parents early one morning to get my tonsils removed in the new hospital in Ashton, the closest town to our ranch.

A fourth is being pushed to the floor boards of an old jeep I would later inherit as my first vehicle.  I was five and the Jeep was slowly overturning on the corner leading down to the ranch after my dad failed to negotiate a huge snow berm.

No one was hurt but I remember walking down to the ranch house where my mom was furious with my dad from fear.

I’m not unusual.  Researchers call our inability to remember much before we are three or four, “childhood amnesia.”  Theorists today believe we can recall information for weeks or months as babies.

But retaining memories involves linking them to verbal cues.

A study published a year ago by researchers at Emory University compared rates of forgetting among young children, college students and middle-aged adults.

It also replicated earlier research into childhood amnesia.

Results showed that in children the earliest memory tended to be 3.67 years.  There was no difference for different age groups or for college students or middle aged adults or even for older adults (ahem!)

In her coverage of that study and others, WSJ Work & Family columnist, Sue Shellenbarger explained that there are three kinds of memories we recall.

One relates is to events that help us feel continuity with who we are or how we’ve changed.  Another type serves to guide behavior such as things we want to avoid repeating.

A third type is “social-bonding memories” that involve relationships.

Shellenbarger continues in her review of these studies, “The ability to draw on all three types of memories predicts higher psychological well-being, a greater sense of purpose and more positive relationships.”

They also help shape better “choices in adolescence and adulthood.”

Parents, especially mothers but often fathers can aid these memories when they use a style that includes asking opened-ended questions versus just repetitive reminiscing.

My daughter manifests this elaborative style with my two grandsons.  These studies show that this is more worthwhile than just taking millions of photos.

Why Do We Call Them Water Bills?

Averaging 38.6 inches annually, Seattle has always been a little defensive about its reputation as a rainy place.  It gets ten inches less than Atlanta and about a little more than 9 inches less than Durham where I live each year.

As a native of the Pacific Northwest, I know that much of Seattle’s rain is in the form of mist and drizzle, while in the Southeast, it tends to fall in more concentrated doses.

But there is another difference that explains, in part, why Seattle has the highest rates for consumption of municipal water even if it doesn’t explain why Atlanta is a close second.

In Durham, the rate for 50 gallons a day is less than $10 a month, while in Seattle, water in that amount is $55 a month, and $42.64 in Atlanta.

Circle of Blue is a Seattle-based news/science source about water that I follow and highly recommend.  Journalist Brett Walton there, who also writes for the Federal Water Tap is fond of explaining that cities don’t charge for water.

They charge for the system to collect, treat and distribute water.  It only makes sense that water bills often include a charge for sewer as well as a fee for managing and rehabilitating storm runoff.

In Durham, those charges related to that amount of water come to another $48.52 compared to $116.23 in Seattle.  But anyone making these comparisons needs to read the fine print.

Durham is on a tiered rate system, with 50 gallons a day being the limit of the lowest tier.  So does Seattle.  But Seattle is way ahead the game when it comes to undergrounding the reservoirs it uses for treatment and distribution (not collection.)

In North Carolina, cities such as Durham, rely on surface water from streams and rivers to fill collection reservoirs, while half of the state’s population still relies on groundwater wells.

Of course, these two sources are interdependent because precipitation recharges groundwater which is then discharged to feed streams which fills reservoirs.

There are 37,662 miles of flowing surface water in North Carolina but half are assessed as impaired, meaning unsuitable for one or more uses, which in turn is why stream clean-up and protection should be an even higher priority here.

Seattle and other Pacific Northwest cities face a different problem.  Not only has snowpack diminished, it is projected to get much worse as climate change intensifies.

In the past, these cities would let their collection reservoirs draw down so they could accommodate the spring thaw.  Now they are trying to keep them at a higher level year around.

But Seattle and now Portland are leading the way in “undergrounding” their distribution and treatment reservoirs to meet federal mandates. 

For those of us in Durham, Little River Lake and Lake Michie are collection reservoirs while what was originally called the Durham Reservoir along Hillandale is one of two treatment and distribution reservoirs.

In the early 1900s, the latter was promoted by the Durham Traction Company (trolley system) as a recreation area.

One of the reasons that Seattle’s water rate is so high is that it has been a leader in converting reservoirs to another form of recreation.  It is undergrounding them and converting the tops to sports and recreation facilities such as softball and soccer fields.

These huge underground storage facilities will reduce evaporation and leakage and make the city’s water supply safer and more secure including the ability to withstand earthquakes.

Portland is not far behind.

One of my nephews earned an advanced degree from Utah State University in the science of horticulture with a specialization in water-efficient landscaping.

It is a discipline at the intersection of biology, design, engineering, politics, law, natural resources, history, psychology, economics, communications and social science.

His work has been helping municipal water utilities in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest instill conservation practices among residents and businesses.

Much of this is best done one on one.

It has always been interesting to me how little time municipalities spend on public outreach to help new residents understand norms and values related to recycling, yard waste, blowing clippings and leaves out of the street, picking up dog waste, etc.

It is because administrators and elected officials have trouble understanding that communication is a critical part of execution and compliance with codes.

Per capita water withdrawals peaked in the United States about 30 years ago, stabilized through 2005 and then began to decline.  By 2010, in the U.S. we withdrew about the same amount we did in 1970.

Public water supplies withdrew 42,000 million gallons per day or 12% of the total in 2010, 63% from surface sources, 57% of which was for domestic use including landscaping.  Of course, there are other demands on public water including commercial, industrial and institutional.

Those in the latter three categories that are withdrawing water from the Durham municipal supply include millions of visitors, university students and non-residents holding down two out of every three jobs here.

In 2010, Durham was using nearly 103 gallons per day per capita while Seattle was using 52 gallons compared to the national average of 89 gallons.  But these numbers can be misleading because this includes more than residential use.

Durham residential water use is projected to increase from 13.24 million gallons per day in 2010 to 22.92 in 2060 even though the population is projected to nearly double.

Seattle’s residential use peaked in 2004 and declined to 32.7 million gallons per day in 2010 and is projected to decline until leveling out in the 2030s and then increasing to 36.8 million gallons per day by 2060 (page 11.)

But hemmed in, its population is expected to increase by only 20% through 2040 by which time Durham will have become the same population that Seattle was in 2010 (page 13.)

Projections, such as these, are very difficult to make.  I smiled as developers along the coast in North Carolina lauded a new report that projects a smaller increase in sea levels by merely shortening the time horizon.

Cities can do so much more in water conservation.  In Durham we have yet to even mandate low-flow toilets in multi-family dwellings or recycling, for that matter.

We can beat these projections.  We must.  Shortening time horizons is shortchanging our children and grandchildren.

The Significance of Understanding Your Natural Rhythm

I am what researchers call a “lark,” someone who, because of the way their circadian rhythms shifts, is genetically a “morning person.”

This is why I still get up around 6 a.m. even though I am retired.  It is why I work out and write these posts early in the morning.  Other people are genetically night “owls” or what researchers call “undifferentiated.”

A researcher at BYU, my alma mater, found in a study that 44% of people are “larks” like me, another 32% are “owls” and 24% are undifferentiated.

Dr. Jeffry H. Larson, who graduated a year before I did, also found that people whose rhythms are mismatched are far more likely to argue and to do so more often.

Researchers at Harvard and the University of Utah found that this can also impact when people are most likely to lie.

Further, researchers at the University of Washington, Johns Hopkins and Georgetown have found that when energy wanes, as it does later in the day for “larks” and earlier for “owls,” is also the time of day overall when people are more likely to be unethical.

For some time now, researchers have studied what they call “social jetlag” and found correlations to our chronology.  This is what some people feel when they go back to work on Monday or after a vacation.

It is also something that many college graduates are about to experience as they shift into the workforce.

Studies of “presenteeism” (present in body but not in mind,) note that it costs nearly $80 billion in annual lost productivity.

Human performance decreases at night by 5%-15%.  Interestingly, turnover drops by more than half when employees are able to modify a select a schedule compared to when mandated.

Some research has found links between “owls” and smoking and obesity.  Other research has found that “owls” are also potentially more creative and possibly have slightly higher IQs.

It isn’t likely that a person can change their chronology, and there are some well documented health reasons for why we sleep and fast at night.

Flex time is a solution but so is encouraging people in the workforce to be more conscious and respectful of the ebb and flow of their own energy as well as that of others so that they take on big projects when they are operating with high energy.

It may be that teams should be assembled, in part, using compatibility in this regard as criteria.

Years ago, during my four-decade career as a community marketing executive, I set a rule that people who helped me protect my calendar could set no more than one meeting for me in the morning and one in the afternoon without first clearing an exception.

This is what Dr. Christine Carter at UC-Berkley, the author of the new book The Sweet Spot: How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work, calls the “minimum effective dose” strategy.

For me, that rule about meetings was one of those “micro-habits” she writes about which, to paraphrase, channel our brain’s natural ability to run on “autopilot” so our habits can “relieve overreliance on willpower.”

I can also see in hindsight, how some people who are unethical and savvy at manipulation, probably took care to select meeting times where the potential for unethical outcomes was most probable.

They may have innately understood what researchers have observed.  Due to the “psychological depletion” people experience as the days wear on, “in the afternoon, the moral slope gets slipperier.”

A 35 Year Decline in the Desire to Work

Some of my progressive friends don’t like to hear this, even from a moderate Independent such as me.

But there is something to the concern that laziness may play a role in why a certain amount of poverty seems impervious despite societal safety nets.  More than 4-in-10 people who are poor seem to think so.

So do most progressives I suspect.  They are just less prone to stereotype the poor than many at the other end of the spectrum.

They also reject remedies from the far right that seek to starve out the small number of poor who are lazy with solutions that undermine millions of children in those homes along with the working poor, who as I will show, are among the most industrious Americans.

Only 26% of drug and alcohol treatment centers are residential and only a handful of those go beyond a few weeks or months.  Even fewer are centered on instilling a work ethic, as are the most successful, some of which also happen to be at no charge.

But ask the latter what the biggest reason is for washing out within the first months or so, regardless of socio-economic level and you’ll learn that it is an unwillingness to work.

Of course, this is a very small portion of those in poverty but while the question hasn’t been asked recently, in opinion polls 40% of those in that circumstance believe some of their peers are not doing enough and don’t really want to work.

This may also explain why many who are addicted prefer to panhandle along roadsides, which seems like it would be much harder than holding down a job.

But refusing to get clean, not lack of access, is why those who are panhandling aren’t able to access shelters and related workforce training.

Take away those who suffer from mental health issues and those who are crooks and you’ll find many who just refuse to work.

By the way, it hasn’t been posted yet but there is an excellent overview of the state of rehab in America in the investigative Mother Jones Magazine this month entitled Hung out to Dry by John Hill.

Apparently, of the 18.7 million Americans who needed alcohol treatment in 2010, only 1.7 million received it.

In a recent nationwide study of Americans, only 24% felt they had achieved the American Dream while 36% felt it unlikely including 21% who no longer give it much thought.

But 86% cited a strong work ethic as essential to achieving the American Dream.  Close behind that was parents or other adults who instill honesty, responsibility and persistence, followed by good schools.

Telling is that 42% felt the answer is individual effort compared to 39% who saw it being aided by society.  Disturbing is that 19% didn’t believe that either was the answer.

Equal percentages (43%) felt that the American Dream was endangered by a decline in work ethic and hard workers being shut out.  The fact that 14% felt that neither reflected their views may shed light on the number who are lazy among all socio-economic strata.

Since 1967, the Current Population Survey has been measuring among other things, the desire among individuals for work, last updated in 2014.

This is analyzed in a paper published last month.

My friends on the right have one answer for every societal ill: government.  Government undermines values, government caused the Great Depression and the Great Recession, government causes pollution, government caused the BP spill in the Gulf and on and on.

Ironically, the study documents that the 35 year decline in the desire to work started just as let ‘em “sink or swim” conservatives launched an all out attack on the safety-net, dramatically cut taxes for the rich and began to harangue and stereotype the poor.

The fraction of non-workforce participants reported as “wanting a job” trended up during the 1970s, then began a decades long slide beginning at the dawn of the 1980s just when the so-called Reagan Revolution promised the opposite.

The study entitled, Declining Desire to Work and Downward Trends in Unemployment and Participation is fascinating because it unwraps why the desire to work went into strong decline in the mid-1990s just after the government moved to “end welfare as we knew it.”

A report last year in the Wall Street Journal noted, using results from a joint survey by that paper and NBC News, how much the opinions of Americans has changed since 1995 regarding the causes of poverty.

In 1995, “Americans were twice as likely to believe poverty resulted from people not doing enough to help themselves out than to attribute it to external forces.”

Today, “Americans are as likely to blame poverty on circumstances beyond people’s control…,” although the majority of those holding power in Congress appear to remain stuck in the 1990s.

The percentage of Americans still holding to the view that it is because of laziness has plummeted, less among Republicans than Democrats and Independents and white Americans overall.

This hasn’t stopped the promotion of failed solutions across the ideological spectrum.  Personally, I favor a national living wage calibrated to localities, more affordable education and a return to a more progressive tax rate to fuel aspirations to achieve the American Dream.

But from my four decades as a chief executive, I feel we need to also find solutions that will address the 2-in-10 Americans who appear a bit lazy without, as many do today, stereotyping the poor.

Even the controversial white paper by the libertarian right Cato Institute, a follow up to one in 1995, acknowledges that “there is no evidence that people on welfare are lazy or do not wish to work.”

Studies also show there is no evidence that people who are poor value education any less or are any less involved with their children or are more addicted to substances than Americans overall.

Nor is there any evidence they are lazier.  In fact, many of these things correlate to incomes as they rise.

Laziness cuts across the entire spectrum, regardless of pocketbook size.  So should any solutions.

A Promising Sign Regarding Sign Desecration

Results of a new poll of North Carolina voters shows that when it comes to provisions of a new billboard bill, legislators who have felt insulated may finally be risking support at the ballot box.

As smoothly and many feel deceptively crafted as SB 320 and HB 304 were  by the billboard lobby, North Carolinians are overwhelmingly opposed to its provisions.

But bi-partisan voter opposition to bills that favor out-of-state billboard companies isn’t new.  More telling this time is that the opposition is strong regardless of gender and geography.

Historically, men have been less protective of scenic preservation but this time they poll even more opposed to these bills than women.

Opposition to provisions such as permitting digital even where they are now prohibited runs 2 to 1 in the northeast and southeast and 3 to 1 along the mountains and metro areas where cities have already permitted them.

Of course, opposition is also high across the age groups billboarders and their remaining advertisers are trying hardest to reach.  The poll shows 5-to-1 opposed for those between age 30 and 45, increasing to 8-to-1 opposed among those age 46-65.

Of particular note to the few advertisers still using billboards is the high turn-off to turn-on ratio they have among consumers they are hoping to reach.

But most revealing is how voters plan to hold supporters accountable.

For a decade now, studies have found that elected officials are rarely held accountable at the ballot box, in part, because “the voices of American citizens are raised and heard unequally,” opening the door for special interests.

This is why a tax loophole, one of the six largest, permits billboard companies to escape paying their share of taxes by claiming their profits are only “rents.” 

Ironically, “rent-seeking” is also the word economists use to describe when companies such as these work the political system to gain favorable treatment rather than working to create economic value in the marketplace.

Similarly, this new legislation would also create another big loophole, permitting thousands of illegal billboards to become legal overnight, further desecrating the North Carolina brand.

To further assault North Carolina taxpayers, if passed and signed by the Governor, this new legislation will also guarantee billboard companies millions of dollars for each one that is removed when it comes time to widen the roadway.

This, even though the courts have ruled the billboards parasitic property because they would have no value in the first place were it not for the taxpayer funded roadways.

However, according to the poll, Tar Heel voters recognize that this is essentially a tax increase on them to benefit out-of-state billboard companies, not exactly the kind of tax-shifting voters like.

This provision in the proposed North Carolina legislation made voters overall less likely to support a legislator who votes for the bill by almost 5-to-1, including 4-to-1 among Republican voters.

If voters remember and follow through come election time, this would represent a sea-change where elected officials are held more accountable for actions they felt were safe in the past because they harmed only those who were not their constituents.

It is a mistaken calculus often used by organizations such as chambers of commerce and more passively, some tourism organizations, which align with the 1/5th of Carolinians who ally with the billboarders, including some doing so in direct opposition to the wishes of businesses and residents in their communities.

This latest poll may reveal not just overwhelming opposition but emergence of a resentment that could drive North Carolina voters to ban billboards altogether one day as voters have in some other states.

The Centrifugal Forces of Identity and Inequality

Short memories recently heralded the news of Durham, North Carolina’s population growth by attributing it to a revitalized downtown.

But that doesn’t explain why Durham was the fastest growing city in the state over the decade of the 1990s, a decade before downtown’s reawakening.

We forget that the Census of 2010 identified 178 million square miles in the U.S. where no one lives, meaning that around 47% of the America is unoccupied.

Carolina Demography reminds us that a decade ago, 40% of the nation’s counties had lost population between 2000 and 2004 including 10 in North Carolina.

But in the period between 2010 and 2014, 53% of the nation’s counties lost population including more than half of those in the South and half of the 100 counties in North Carolina, one of the nation’s fastest growing states.

Some of this is due to out-migration and some because the remaining population is aging out.

Rather than seeking to study and emulate places such as Durham as a “best practice, a few, very frustrated regressives in state legislatures here and across the country are pushing through repeated legislation to defile cities.

Otherwise reasonable people, they fit the definition Gallup uses in studies to identify those who seek to undermine any work environment, as “actively disengaged.”

But this relatively small group of regressives isn’t the reason this ongoing defilement of places is taking place in states such as North Carolina.

The enablers are those peers who are merely disengaged, roughly half, according to studies.

Just putting in time, these enablers fail to study or even read legislation trading the input of constituents for that of special interests paying for access or hoping for reciprocity.

An eventual sea-change when it inevitably comes will be when voters begin to hold accountable this latter group.

People often wonder if cities and towns really matter to people, in part, because it seems so many are in such a hurry to destroy what makes them distinct and marketable.

But surveys which I repeated in a former life after seeing confidential results of polling by news outlets show that individual cities not only matter but so do the neighborhoods and streets where dwellers live.

Since the 1950s, when broadcast licenses were issued for television, those meant to serve Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and more than 20 surrounding counties, used their airwaves instead to try and erase the identities of individual communities.

The reason, of course, was that they could charge more to advertisers if they could hoodwink them into believing consumers would commute long distances to buy something readily available closer by.

Repeatedly, however, opinion polls showed that overwhelmingly, people preferred to characterize where they live by the name of a specific city, town or county.

Next in characterization came specific neighborhoods and streets and a very distant fourth came the notion of region so desperately pushed by broadcasters.

Rather than castrating cities and towns or trying to stamp out their identities, or pit rural and urban areas against one another, we should look at where the problems intersect.

A good start might be to carefully read a Brookings Institution report released last summer entitled The Growth and Spread of Concentrated Poverty, 2000 to 2008-2012 when the number of people living in distressed neighborhoods grew by 5 million.

Secondly is recommended a study of Complete Streets, particularly as they relate to economic development.  Don’t get too literal as you read this.  Strategically, it is relevant to rural areas as urban.

Third is a book entitled, The Vanishing Neighbor and its explanation of the importance of networks, especially those involving the less intimate “middle rings.”

Tying these resources together, a reading is recommended of a new book entitled Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by renowned sociological researcher Dr. Robert Putnum who also wrote Bowling Alone and co-wrote American Grace.

Putnam traces the roots of today’s inequality and lack of upward mobility through towns, neighborhoods, families, parenting, schooling and community and proposes remedies in each area.

What he calls the centrifugal dispersion that altered cities and towns creating economic and class disparities, especially racial, probably also created a vacuum and related suction, as centrifugal forces do in a pump, that similarly also impacted rural areas.

We need to work together not against one another to resolve both.

It must begin, I believe, by electing truly engaged public officials at every level and in every district.

I am referring to representatives who are willing to stand up against special interests and who hear the voices of all citizens equally, even if they are not raised equally.

The Future of Wearables is More than Devices

In its February trends snapshot, Blueshift Research found that 40% of Americans made no change over the last six months when it came to living habits such as diet, exercise, sleep etc., up six points from a year ago.

The “no change” group is where I was over the last several decades despite periodically committing to do better.

Unfortunately, nearly 17% responded to the survey that their living habits had actually worsened, 3.1% significantly so over the six month span since this trend was last measured.

The good news is that during that same span 43% of us felt they had improved their living habits, 7% significantly.  A 2008 study calculated that “inactivity” costs the U.S. $76 billion in healthcare spending.

So I often wonder what finally made me shift gears 19 months ago after years of resolutions and wasted gym memberships.

Was it finally finding a spiritual connection while walking each morning?

Was it having a significant other to do that with, which has been expanded to include weight conditioning twice a week?

Was it using a fitness tracker and a linked app to track the caloric content of various foods I was eating?

Was it being confronted by a tiny belly roll when a portrait was hung to honor three of us just before I retired?

Was it that first sign of a film like build up in one of my carotid arteries?

Intrigued, I’ve been trying to reverse engineer what made me finally get serious.

It is not as though my doctor hadn’t been cautionary for several years about normalizing the level of triglycerides levels in my blood.

I always see the waiting room at the clinic where I get annual physicals full of people who are in much worse shape than I was and seemingly oblivious to the inappropriateness of yoga pants or having to lean over to see their shoes..

Medicare is now going to start holding doctors accountable for patient changes by calibrating what they are paid to outcomes.  But I am not sure how much more they can do to cajole each of us into accepting personal responsibility for our health.

Two years ago, a Pew Study found that 45% of U.S. adults are dealing with at least one chronic health condition but 7-in-10 overall keep track of a health indicator including 19% who have no chronic conditions.

But only a fifth use technological devices such as wearables with nearly half doing so only in their head.

Last year’s report by Endeavor Partners found that 1-in-10 adult Americans owned a fitness tracker, 1-in-4 between the ages of 25 and 34.  Unfortunately, more than half no longer use it and a third stopped using it within six months.

Key for sustainable use, according to the report, are 3 behavioral factors: habit formation, social motivation and goal reinforcement along with 6 other factors such as utility, design, fit, out of the box experience etc.

Fitbit, the one I have used since early 2010 when it came out, appeared to score highest overall among the eight different fitness “wearables” measured in the report.

Juniper Research projects that use of fitness devices and wearables will triple by 2018.  Some analysts project these devices will reach 48% market penetration worldwide by then.

A new Pew study shows that 64% of Americans now own Smartphones, double the proportion from just four years ago.  Smartphones have also rapidly become the means by which low income and disadvantaged Americans go online.

More than 60% of Smartphone owners use their phones to get health information, 57% to do online banking, 43% to look up job information and 30% to take a class or get educational content.

Making outdoor billboard advertising even more obsolete, more than 67% of smartphone owners use their phone for turn-by-turn navigation while driving, 32% do so frequently, compared to less than 1% of Americans who still rely on a billboard.

But wearables such as those for fitness and health are set to make “interruption” advertising such as billboards even more obsolete, according to PwC.

They will accelerate even faster the rapid transition to interest-based, content marketing but only when relevant and needed now.

Studies have shown that the three-decade decline in the effectiveness of traditional advertising has reached a negative return on investment overall.

Fitness and wellness apps are on track to more than sextuple by next year from what they were in 2010.  But a report issued last year by PwC shows plenty of reasons that businesses and organizations will soon get involved, too.

Already, 70% of consumers “say they would wear employer-provided wearable devices streaming anonymous data to a pool in exchange for a break on their insurance premiums” something that will obviously catch the attention of insurers in Obamacare exchanges.

The World Health Organization recommends that people get 30 active minutes a day.  A premium feature of the device I wear shows on a bell curve where I fall compared to men my age and weight as well as other demographics overall.

Telling is that at 30 “very” active minutes on average per day, I am in the 89th percentile for my group, or over 185% of the median. For many weeks I average over 40, over 300% of the median.

This means that, unfortunately, I am in the top 11% and regularly in the top 3%.

The center of that bell curve is only 6 “very” active minutes.  Even scarier is that I am 400% over the median for many of those people waiting in my doctor’s office.

People are nearly twice as likely to purchase and use fitness bands and smart watches if employers pay for them.  But the future of wearables goes beyond fitness.

More than half of the adults in the survey agree that automated facial recognition will replace the need to remember names, 56% say life expectancy will increase an average of 10 years and 46% believe wearables will decrease obesity.

But wearables, even for fitness, are rapidly moving beyond devices.  A report yesterday by KUED notedthat consumers are already moving to biometric clothing such as Hexoskin which report metrics beyond those done by devices.

Another by Athos is designed to help with weight and flexibility training.  Analysts project that sales of fitness device wearables will soon plateau or go down due to the overlap between smart wristbands and smart or sports watches.

But sales of smart garments such as Athos are projected to grow to 26 million units next year, up 2,600 times what they were in 2013 and more than two and a half times what they will be this year.

It will be interesting to see if they have a sustained impact on the overall health outcomes for Americans.

The Unintended Consequences of A Policy Change

I was just turning 40 when the issue over smoking on airline flights reached a tipping point and then banned in the U.S. in November of 1989, six months after we jumpstarted the community destination marketing for Durham, North Carolina.

So until recently, I assumed the continued presence of ashtrays on the doors of airliner lavatories merely dated the age of the aircraft.

But federal law, while prohibiting smoking inflight, including the levy of stiff fines for lighting up in the “john,” still requires the installation of ashtrays there on new aircraft as a safety precaution.

Far too often though, prohibitions such as smoking bans fail to include careful consideration of unintended, but costly consequences.

In mid-2012 Durham, NC, where I live, enacted what at the time was the most comprehensive smoking ban in North Carolina and possibly the Southeast.  Soon, workers quickly removed all ashtrays for cigarette butts from the bus stops.

The logic was that leaving them in place would encourage smoking but instead, taking them away has resulted in these areas being littered with butts.  But studies show that merely leaving these receptacles in place may have had little impact.

In 2008, a study was conducted, in part, to observe how smokers dispose of cigarette and cigar butts.  Only 15% used the ashtray while 40 flicked them on the ground including into shrubs while 27% left the site with the butt in hand.

During intercepts, self-reported litterers reported the greatest likelihood of littering occurring with cigarette butts.

Even more telling, smokers were also nearly twice as likely overall to litter as non-smokers, even when cigarette butts were excluded from the measure.

One wonders why anti-littering campaigns have failed to use this information to better target efforts just as agencies have learned to use animal abuse around a home as an indication that domestic abuse is likely there too?

Cities began to ban smoking on public transportation in 1936, more than three decades after several states had tried to do so and while tobacco companies were busy advertising how good smoking was for your teeth.

At the time, according to advertising research conducted for Fortune Magazine, 53% of adult American males including 66% of those under 40 smoked.

As of three months ago, according to the Blueshift Research Trends Tracker, 84.3% of Americans don’t smoke including 55% who have never smoked according to the CDC.

Of the 15% who do (13.4% daily,) 53% smoke cigarettes and 26% smoke cigars, yet tobacco products represent 38% of all litter along roadways, 23% of which comes from pedestrians.

It is only one of the ways smokers still shift billions of dollars of costs off onto those who don’t.

About 29 of every 100 adults who live below the poverty level are smokers, a rate much higher than those not in poverty.

The rate is also much higher among those who are disabled or work limited as it also is for LGBT Americans.

Recent studies show that smoking is increasing within poorer neighborhoods while it is disappearing in affluent neighborhoods.  report on CNN a year ago noted that “the chronic stress of poverty drives unhealthy behaviors.”

Societal stress may be the reason higher rates of smoking are also found in the other groups as well.

Based on the findings of the behavioral analysis of litterers, researchers have begun to look closely at the links between depression, smoking and littering in poor neighborhoods.

The 4% of litterers who admit doing it on purpose say it was just because they were having a bad day.

Depression, according to experts, is not about feeling sad or mad as much as it is about not caring anymore; a lack of vitality.

Its association with poverty is also why so-called sin-taxes to discourage smoking and lower its burden on those who don’t, may be too blunt an instrument to root it out entirely.

There also appears to be a direct link between cigarette smuggling and the level of taxation on cigarettes purchases, up to half of all cigarettes consumed in some states.

Banning tobacco makes sense, but it makes equally good sense to examine whether removing ashtrays or leaving smokers no options such as in airports yields hidden costs such as litter.

This may be why in Utah, where resident smokers are now only 9 out of 100 adults, there are special, high exhaust chambers in the Salt Lake Airport, intended for visitors as well as residents and paid for, in part, by a reduction in litter and illegal smoking elsewhere.

All of this is to say that bans on products such as smoking require thoughtful execution.

The Resiliency of Today’s Student Traveler

Bacchanalia grabs all of the headlines about spring break for colleges giving a distorted view of student travel, especially as it has evolved over the past decade.

According to analysis of various studies published recently in a white paper by Skift and StudentUniverse, student travel now represents “fully one-fifth of all International arrivals” in the travel sector and they go “far beyond the backpack-and-party crowd.”

In fact, history and culture rank as more important than parties for both males and females.  Of relief to parents of young daughters, several other experiences including local food rank higher than parties and nightlife.

Significantly, by more than three to one, females would have still traveled even without those social gatherings.

I found it interesting that 60% of this travel is female, and families pick up just over a third of the cost.  The students come from more than 4,100 public and private colleges.

Nothing replaces experience in the workforce during college but it is interesting that 97% of these student travelers felt the trip improved their self-confidence, and 99% believed the travel provided insights to personal strengths and weaknesses.

Nearly 9-in-10 of the student travelers surveyed felt the trip helped them get a job.

I had just turned 19 when I took my first cross country plane trip from my native Rockies in 1967.  I wasn’t ready yet, physically or emotionally, to make the most of my trip to Western Europe.

My daughter studied there for several months in high school and returned during her college years.

Students today are even more prepared for these experiences than either me or even my daughter were.

Of course, mobile devices are a game-changer.  My daughter, who is now the single mother of two grandsons and a chief privacy and ethics officer, often marvels with me at what it would have been like to have that access while she was growing up.

By 2020, the market value of this type of travel will reach $320 billion with U.S. destinations being equal beneficiaries of those inbound to this country.

Important to note is that student travelers are more than three times as likely to use various Internet devices for in-destination information as they are local hosts.

Today’s student travelers are also more resilient when it comes to “terrorism, political and social unrest, disease and natural disasters” requiring helicopter parents to lighten up.

Three Take Aways From Our Time On The Road

I rarely listen to sports talk radio unless I’m on a cross-country road trip such as the one my English bulldog Mugsy, and I completed last week.

Unrelated to sports, three things stood out to me from sporadically listening to those shows besides learning that “deflategate” involved only one football, not twelve as had been widely reported. 

Sports fans love conspiracies (e.g. the Seahawks called the last play to make sure a certain player was not the MVP had the team won.)

Now there is speculation that it was the Colts who deflated the one ball found to be underinflated after it had been in that teams possession, not the Patriots as alleged (smile.)

One of the things that caught my attention was an expert who explained how many people confuse confidence and arrogance.

This is a misperception that has often been made about me since high school and one that some fans make about Patriots Quarterback Tom Brady who led his team to four Super Bowl championships after not being drafted until the199th player chosen.

One of my favorite explanations of the difference between confidence and arrogance is one I read just before I retired by Harvey Mackay, the author of Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive:

“Confidence in one's ability is a critical element in the willingness to take risks while still steering the ship. Arrogance takes risks by assuming everyone will get on board even when the boat has a hole in it.”

The second thing that caught my attention was something I’ve rarely  heard discussed publically among people who are black.  It was when Larry Foote, a middle linebacker for the Arizona Cardinals called Marshawn Lynch, the star fullback of the Seattle Seahawks, out for antics during the Super Bowl:

“I’m from the same type of urban environment that he’s from and the biggest message that he’s giving these kids, he might not want to admit it, is the hell with authority.

‘I don’t care, fine me, I’m gonna grab my crotch, I’m gonna do it my way.’ In the real world, it doesn’t work that way. It just doesn’t.

How can you keep a job. I mean, you got these inner city kids, they don’t listen to teachers, they don’t listen to police officers, principals and these guys can’t even keep a job because they say ‘F’ authority.”

It was the kind of introspective candor that would have given the protests related to events in Ferguson, Missouri during our cross country trip last summer so much more credibility among those who were skeptical.

But enough about sports.

The last observation that caught my attention was a hint of desperation by one talk show host when, with relief in his voice, he inferred that a drop in audience was due to younger listeners time-shifting with podcasts.

I was listening to those talk shows on satellite radio but often I would stream music via Pandora from my smartphone, and I wondered just how prevalent that has become via any of the music streaming services.

At our next overnight stop, I drilled down into the details of a study of music streamers (at least monthly) and non-streamers (use it less than monthly or not at all including non-music listeners.)

Non-streamers over-index to genres like country or folk or a combination such as roots music so I am in the minority there.

Music streamers, according to the study, are only slightly (63% to 61%) more likely to listen to music in their cars but far more likely to listen to music at home and three times as likely to listen to it while traveling, as I was.

Non-streamers are only comparable when listening to music on a computer.

Interestingly, Spotify commissioned the study to learn more about how streamers vs. non-streamers connect to brands.  It turns out that streamers are nearly twice as likely to feel emotionally connected to a brand and more importantly to be an advocate.

A separate tracking study by Blueshift Research shows that among music streamers, 40.9% use Pandora Free (which includes advertising,) 25.4% use YouTube, 11.8% use Spotify Free and iHeart Radio each and 10.3% use iTunes Free.

Only 2% in my age bracket pay to a fee to avoid the ads as I do.  Indicative of how fast streaming is being adopted as a music alternative to radio, only 31.7% have yet to access it.

That is now nearly the same percentage of Americans (30.6%) who do not pay for TV in their homes.  Many Americans, 38.7% of those ages 18-29, have never had pay TV service such as cable or satellite.

Of Americans who are cord cutters, 10.4% have shifted to streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu and 7.6% have reverted to free TV using an antenna.  The average streamer uses 2.3 services.

Even more interesting is that 60.5% of cord cutters are women including 21% with children younger than 5 living with them.  Some of this is due to how costly and inflexible pay packages became but a good deal has to do with advertising.

Traditional advertising is a form of “yelling” to get your attention rather than earning it.  Savvy parents know how unpredictably inappropriate much of this yelling is for young people.

Paid television, may soon be dominated, as sports talk radio is, by advertising relevant only to some adult males.

Every form of advertising has slipped since 2008.  Even garish digital billboards have not stopped the decline of outdoor advertising use, now relevant to less than 2% of consumers and known more for clear cutting roadside forests and desecrating views.

Online advertising, though, has increased during this span nearly 300%, most of that now as content-driven advertising, delivered not as interruption but there when you need it.

According to a new report by Borrell Associates, true digital advertising such as this has now grown to the “dominance newspapers enjoyed for years, until the late 1990s.”

We look at services such as Uber as disrupting the way we access vehicles for hire but according to analysts at BIA/Kelsey, they may be signaling a revolution in how we access all goods and services at the local level (aka ODLS or On-Demand Local Services.)

Nowhere is this change more relevant than to small and medium size businesses and organizations (SMBs.)  It is not just the final nail in the coffin for traditional advertising at any level but a revolution in marketing.

Failing to Account for Changes in Consumer Behavior

Analysis of data gathered as part of the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts shows that Americans attending performing arts performances dropped from 39% in 1982 to 33.4% in 2012.

The percentage attending musicals has fallen from 17.1% to 15.2% between 2002 and 2012, during a decade when communities, especially in the South, went on an explosive spending spree predicated on that art form, while attendance at arts events in the South Atlantic fell lower than it did nationwide.

Even more worrisome, the number of annual visits per attendee by these musical theater-goers fell from 2.3 to 2 during that decade with attendance from various minority groups still a fraction of the overall population they represent.

Nearly 60% of attendance at musicals is now from those with household incomes of $100,000 or more, with 32.4% making $150,000 or more, predominantly older, white Americans.

This is hardly reassuring given the rapid transformation underway in demographics which is often disguised by increases in the overall population.  Nor is the percentage of Americans attending performing arts the only cultural activity in decline.

The percentage attending visual arts festivals or crafts fairs has declined from 33.4% to 22.4% over the decade between 2002 and 2012.

The percentage visiting historic sites or historic neighborhoods and architecture has fallen from 31.6% to 23.9% over that span while the percentage attending amateur or professional sports events fell from 35% to 30%.

Community destination marketing organizations (DMOs) will be able to find useful benchmarks in the analysis.

DMOs have the means to obtain the percentage of Americans who participate in individual activities.  If a DMO has subscribed to receive this data, it can be compared to general interest in an activity from studies such as this one as a means to understand potential.

On trips of 50 miles or more away, less than 10% of Americans will participate in particular activities of interest they enjoy while at home.

A handful of DMOs, such as the one for Durham, NC, where I live, gather marketing intelligence on day-trip visitors who travel less than 50 miles from home.

Studies such as this one provide an idea of the interest level for an activity in that radius, although again, the proportion interested in enjoying that activity while away, regardless of proximity, is a third of what it is at home.

But there are many other consumer behaviors to take into account.

Access to opportunity is one.  It is the long observed behavior that the more access a consumer has to an activity, the less likely or motivated they are to participate.

This means, for example, that the motivation to go to a musical or concert will lessen now that there are theaters offering those events in Charlotte, Durham, Greensboro and Raleigh.

Another is that participation can rapidly change over time as lifestyles change.

We’ve been aware for two decades now that the talent communities seek to attract is much less likely than earlier generations to frequent events in large-scale venues.

Rather than paying a large sum to sit looking forward without interacting for several hours is much less interesting to them than a street scene where they can come and go to a smorgasbord of various establishments such as restaurants, stores and nightclubs.

Even an analysis of motivations behind attendance at performing arts shows finds that more than three-quarters do it to socialize with family or friends.  Of those who didn’t attend, 44% cited lack of time and cost as the reasons.

Only 6.9% cited lack of interest in the program or event as a barrier to attending.

Musicals, in particular, should take note.  From my experience, the songs are far too long and the entire production is often twice the length it needs to be for the same impact.  I’m obviously not their target audience but neither is half the audience and it never hurts to recalibrate.

Communities spend tens of millions on cultural venues but usually have their minds made up by the time they do a feasibility study having already dismissed data available from their DMO, should it be data-driven.

But even if officials didn’t have those wires crossed or were better at fending off special interests focused on propping up property values to instead keep their minds open, few consultants are inclined or able to factor in some of the things noted above.

Almost never do these consultants analyze the effects of access to opportunity or even inventory a community’s comp set to index the number of venues to population.

Also missing, in the words of Indiana professor Joanna Woronkowski, an expert on cultural policy is an analysis of whether these proposed facilities risk “wasting scarce public resources and creating negative externalities” such as unwanted gentrification by destroying the day to day linkages that foster entrepreneurialism.

I’ve never found a feasibility report that looks at the risk new mainstream facilities can do to a community’s sense of place ecosystem or closely examine the mistakes of other communities who did something similar rather than only those they envy.

Of course, travel and leisure activities are not the only areas of activity undergoing fundamental change.

Durham largest and oldest Rotary Club is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year dating back to when the movement was born.  Through valiant effort, it is transforming its membership to be younger, more diverse.

But here and across the world, models such as this were focused not only to provide social interaction and feeding ground for extroverts but to harness critical mass to solve problems and improve communities.

Leaders there are well advised to read The Vanishing Neighborhood by researcher Marc Dunkelman.  In part, it is a review of books and studies dealing with a behavioral transformation among Americans since WWII which appears to be accelerating.

As the author notes, “mainframe” approaches such as this which have become as much about fundraising as about socializing or doing are giving way to generations now more comfortable with ad hoc groups that form around issues or projects and then dissolve.

DMOs have been forced for decades by stakeholders to keep scores of obsolete organizations on life support that at one time made sense but failed to grasp when their missions were accomplished or no longer relevant.

Communities and groups are well advised to be much more judicious when adding to cultural offerings by studying more closely the changes in consumer behaviors and the concept of obsolescence.

It will take them back to a deeper appreciation of what makes a community distinct and organically appealing and the values and traits that make a particular place worthy of love.

When and Why Facts and Data Backfire

To hear some people talk, you would think that tourism to Durham, North Carolina took off only after the opening of the acclaimed Durham Performing Arts Center.

I’ll correct this misperception, but more importantly use this essay to show why the facts will backfire with many of these people.

Durham draws 9 million visitors a year, 6.26 million for leisure.  About 300,000 attend events at DPAC, a little over two thirds with that as the main purpose of their visit or about 3% of Durham leisure visitation.

During the span DPAC has been open, the overall visitation to Durham has increased by about 44% overall and 40% for leisure travel, or 1.79 million visitors of which visitors to DPAC as their main reason was 13% if no one was diverted visiting elsewhere in Durham anyway.

Significant but hardly a tipping point for visitation.

Many Durham features, events and businesses harvest the same proportion of visitors to overall attendance as DPAC does.  Visitation to a community is highly fragmented when it comes to activity.

If there is a silver bullet that ties all of these fragments together it is promotion of the sense of place in Durham’s DNA.  Without this communities become more like shopping malls of clustered features that can be found in nearly every mall of this type.

People who wake up to the fact a community is visitor worthy only when something new opens may be fooled into that mistaken inference by anecdotally-driven news hyperbole.

But even residents of a community rarely have any idea numerically of their community’s visitor appeal.  That typically requires a DMO savvy enough to perpetually communicate to internal audiences the importance overall of visitor-centric economic and cultural development.

During my long-concluded four-decade career in community destination marketing I found this kind of misperception was far more frequently rooted in segments of the population with lukewarm if not border-line negative perceptions of the potential or sense of a particular place.

But my breakdown of the facts above has been scientifically shown to pucker many up, tightening their grip instead on misperception.

In mid-1978, when I took the reins of the DMO in Anchorage, there was a perception that all tourism activity was related to passengers of cruise ships docking solely at the time in Southeast Alaska when a portion added group excursions overland before or after.

It took me 30 months but by 1981 we had conducted research to shed much more light on visitors to Anchorage.  Not counting visiting friends and relatives, business travelers including convention delegates or the 22% who combined business and pleasure, 7% was related to visitors taking a cruise ship or ferry to Alaska.

This was about 1-in-5 vacation visitors to Anchorage in 1981.  Studying the origins, length of stay and activities of the other 4-in-5 gave us the marketing intelligence to strategically and significantly expand visitation to Anchorage within just a few years without taking anything away from traditional Alaska tourism.

Even more shocking from the 1981 data, 67% of visitation to Anchorage came in the non-summer months, 80% from outside Alaska and more than a fifth during months where there is snow.

Offseason visitation had been 1 visitor for every 10 when I arrived in Anchorage and before I left it would be 1 to 1.

What I didn’t expect though from that 1981 data is that for a few,  it shook their belief-system right to the core.  They took the data revelations as criticism and soon painted a target on my back.

Unforunately, they were not unique that way.

Changing perceptions, let alone saving my hide, was never the goal of the study.

Most in Anchorage were open-minded about visitation and not only delighted with the new information and perspective but relieved that its relatively nascent community marketing agency was using these newly discovered facts to set strategy.

It has been more than three decades since then, and sadly, the vast majority of communities still have no idea how many visitors they have, let alone why they came or what they do while visiting.

This makes these places subject to mistaken conventional wisdom, faulty belief systems and big game hunting that instead of reinforcing whatever part of their unique sense of place remains, gradually hollows it out instead.

Durham, where I finished the last half of my career and still live in obscurity (smile) is an exception, probably 1-in-500, having begun to regularly secure data specific to its visitation twenty five years ago.

Still, I was always caught off guard throughout my career at how many officials, developers and boosters seemed much more comfortable instead with making decisions when it comes to tourism infrastructure on what what’s “new and shiny” or what they hear, or “who was asking,”  spending hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars that way.

It wouldn’t be until a year or so before I retired at the end of 2009 that a series of studies by researchers at the University of Michigan and Georgia State University shed light on how facts backfire with misinformed people, particularly if their belief system is based on motivated reasoning.

In the words of journalist Joe Keohane who penned a review of the studies, “Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation stronger.”

That’s something obviously still more than a bit lost on me if you are a regular reader (smile.)

According to the researchers, this is a natural defense mechanism to avoid the cognitive dissonance of having to admit we’re wrong.  It is also far more comfortable to be close-minded than to endure the ambiguity and uncertainty of being open-minded.

But it is a sure death knell for community sense of place.

It is also, in part, why other studies find that nearly all traditional advertising is now a waste, especially as a means of changing opinions about or the image of product, including communities. 

Advertising, in the traditional sense, merely reinforces the belief systems of consumers who are already positive or negative.  It is incapable in the few seconds the average person pays attention, and lacks the credibility to influence any who are neutral.

The overwhelming reason for a DMO to use facts and far more effective content-based marketing is to help consumers who are unsure but open-mined about a product including the potential of a place to visit or live.

They are, in fact, open to corrections, to being informed, to facts.

Communities that fail to use facts when it comes to evolving their delicate sense of place ecosystems leave themselves open to the “motivated reasoning” of boosters, “boomers” and “big game hunters,” most of whom lack faith in a community’s ability or the necessity of evolving to remain distinctive, futilely seeking imports instead.

They are the reason that being data-driven community destination marketing agency is so hazardous.  “Motivated reasoning” also makes people very mean.

But just remember:  communities that remain worthy of love are worthy of good and fearless defenders.