Southern Exposure

It's been happening for the past 30 years: a seemingly endless influx of Northerners, Westerners and other transplants into the Raleigh-Durham area.

Drawn by the region's promise of a high quality of life and the high-tech job market of Research Triangle Park, a steady stream of relocators from around the nation has been flowing into Durham--and bringing a whole new culture to the area.

Between 1980 and 1997, the population of the Raleigh-Durham metropolitan area grew by more than half, from 665,000 to 1,050,000, according to U.S. Census Bureau statistics.

And over the past decade, Jacob Vigdor, an assistant professor of public policy studies, estimates the area has continued to attract about 20,000 more people every year.

"Some of them are probably coming from other countries," he says, referring to Latino immigrants in particular. "But a very large number will be coming from the Northeast, the Midwest and the West Coast."

Explaining the Influx

What attracted this slew of cosmopolitan Northerners and technology-minded Westerners to the small Southern tobacco town that was the Durham of 50 years ago?

"It's been mainly the Research Triangle Park," says Becky Heron, a member of the Durham County Board of Commissioners. "It's been the goose that laid the golden egg."

That demand led to a corresponding increase in the population of the region, as companies tried to attract the workers they needed by offering good salaries and playing up the Triangle's low cost of living.

Biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, traditionally based in the Northeast, attracted Northerners, while high-tech firms tended to bring in new employees from the West, says Durham Mayor Bill Bell.

With the newcomers, they brought the desire for the more cosmopolitan lifestyle that they were used to--more upscale housing, more shopping opportunities and more art and cultural events, as well as better government services.

"That required local governments to provide more, and we had two bond issues in the late '80s and early '90s [to pay for] new schools, renovating schools, water and sewer infrastructure, dealing with the arts community... all because of the demands and the level of the services that the community was asking for," says Bell, who came to Durham from New Jersey in 1968 to work for IBM.

Such improvements, in turn, served to enhance the quality of life in the region and attract even more residents. And when national magazines like Fortune and Money started to pick up on the trend, giving awards to the Triangle as one of the best places in the country to do business, still more companies, and their employees, began to flood the region, and the population increase continued to propagate itself.

Meanwhile, students from around the country, attracted to the region's universities, began to set down roots in the Triangle due to job opportunities in RTP.

Now, says county commissioner Ellen Reckhow, many of the region's professionals are transplants. At a recent Durham Chamber of Commerce class for about 25 business leaders, she says, a speaker asked how long different people had lived in Durham.

"When he asked for people who had been born in Durham, only three or four raised their hands," says Reckhow, a Boston native. "But that's indicative of what the leadership of the business and industrial community is."

Northern or Southern?

As Durham grew from tobacco town to City of Medicine, the atmosphere changed correspondingly, leading some to question whether the city is really part of the South.

Signs of the Northern influence on Durham are everywhere, from increased cultural activities to the modern architecture of RTP and the Levine Science Research Center at Duke University to the proliferation of retailers, restaurants and the new Streets at Southpoint mall.

"The fact that you've got a mall like Southpoint to bring in a store like Nordstrom's.... It's less southern in the sense that the demographics have changed," Bell says.

And in what was once the domain of good ol' southern barbecue, a multitude of ethnic restaurants--from Japanese to Middle Eastern to Chinese to Ethiopian--has sprung up.

"People are always asking me what it's like to live in the South," says Vigdor, who moved from Boston three years ago. "You know, I tell them I don't really feel like I live in the South.

"I know where the South is, it's about 10 miles from my house," he continues. "You drive out in the country, you're practically in Deliverance County. But you can walk around Duke's campus, you can walk around downtown Raleigh, and you don't hear very many southern accents.... You hear a southern accent and you still think to yourself, OGee, that's kind of quaint.'"

Vigdor's experience has been that of transplanted Northerners for the past 20 years. For instance, Reckhow moved to the area in 1980 when her husband, Kenneth, took a job as a professor at what is now Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment.

"In a lot of ways, we're the typical transplants," she says. "Even in 1980, Durham had a more cosmopolitan feel than other places in the South, because of the in-migration that Durham had already had.

"I was afraid, having lived in the North all my life, that I would feel out of place," she says. "But in fact I did not."

But if Durham displayed some northern features in 1980, each passing year has made those even more commonplace.

"What we've seen around here is really a continuous process," Vigdor says. "I talk to people who say five years ago you wouldn't have seen this--you wouldn't have seen an Indian restaurant. But five years ago [someone else would have said] the same thing about something else."

From Tobacco to Technology

Already, the Durham of today is arguably closer in feel to a Northern city than to the Durham of a half-century ago.

"Things are quite different," says Durham City Council member Cora Cole-McFadden, a Durham native. "Streets are paved. There's a more expansive bus system, there are shopping centers everywhere you want to go, the schools are integrated, different facets of the community are working together--things have changed. But things have changed for the better."

Howard Clement, a long-time member of the City Council who has lived in Durham for 42 years, agrees.

"We're no longer considered a tobacco town, a textile town--nothing wrong with tobacco, nothing wrong with textiles and of course the legacies of the tobacco and textile industries have contributed much to the history of Durham," says the Rowan County, N.C., native.

"Durham today is thriving, growing, a viable diverse community--that wasn't the case 40 years ago.... My father said something must have happened to Durham to allow [a black City Council member like] me to be elected.... Whether it was good, bad or indifferent, only history will decide,"Clement says.

Some fear that if Durham's growth continues unchecked, the city could lose its distinctive character.

"What we have to do... is to look at the city, and look at the things that we really like about this place... and as much as possible try to preserve that character," Cole-McFadden says.

"For instance, there are people who really like the rural atmosphere and there are people who have moved here trying to get away from all the pavement," she continues. "And if we aren't careful we're going to lose a lot of the rural character of this community."

Cole-McFadden's perspective is typical of "smart growth" proponents, who caution that the area must be careful not to grow so fast that it cannot provide the water, sewer or transportation infrastructure needed to support its current quality of life.

"Right now I think our quality of life is both an asset and a liability because the quality of life is attracting people here, but as more and more people come we have the potential to lose it," Reckhow says.

Vigdor says that from a demographic perspective, it is very hard for a city to maintain a high quality of life for many years.

"This is one thing that you see time and time again if you look at the history of cities," he explains. "If you suddenly discover a city where the quality of life is just 10 times as good as anywhere else, people will move there until there's no advantage to moving there anymore."

Arguably, the quality of life has already begun to drop in Durham, but leaders are convinced that there is still a way to keep it high.

"We are beginning to see some of the problems we have seen in the North with the transportation and the traffic problems," says Heron, a 47-year Durham resident originally from South Carolina. "We're trying to plan for all these things that have made this area attractive.... We want to keep it that way."

Planning for the Future

One thing seems clear: Durham's growth isn't finished yet; both transplants from the West and Northeast and Latino immigrants continue to show indications of wanting to come to the Triangle.

"It's going to become more like the large metropolitan areas like Boston," Reckhow says.

But at the same time, local leaders are committed to preserving a touch of the area's individual southern identity.

"I think what's unique about this area is that in spite of the fact that you have three major cities... each has its own uniqueness and we've been able to maintain that," Bell says, referring to projects like the ongoing transformation of old tobacco warehouses into retail, office and residential space.

"The fact that we're trying to retain the physical structures that maintained the environment of Durham for so long... gives it a certain character that you can't find in any of those other cities," he says.

Clearly, parts of that character have changed over the years, just as the function of the old brick buildings that mark Durham's downtown have changed, but the essential core remains.

It may not always be obvious right on the surface, but there's something unmistakable, and unique, about Durham's atmosphere.

"It's not the city that it was 25 years ago, that's for sure, but it's not the North either," Heron says. "We're going to be a nice southern town that has a lot to offer to people."