Destination Durham: Local chamber’s annual Community Leadership Visit takes leaders to North Carolina Research Triangle

Following several years of attending nearby regional spots such as Tulsa, Oklahoma, and northwest Arkansas, the delegation for the Springfield Area Chamber of Commerce’s annual Community Leadership Visit headed to the East Coast this month for a first-time destination.

For the chamber’s Sept. 10-12 trip, more than 80 Springfield area businesspeople sojourned to the Tar Heel State – specifically Durham – North Carolina’s fourth most populous city. With a population nearing 300,000, Durham is part of the state’s Research Triangle, which gets its name from the Research Triangle Park and a trio of universities that are only minutes apart – Duke University, North Carolina State University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Research Triangle Park is home to over 250 businesses and stretches roughly 7,000 acres across Durham and Wake counties, according to the Research Triangle Research Partnership website. Major employers in the park include Bayer, Cisco, Lenovo and IBM.

Matt Morrow, Springfield chamber president and CEO, said Durham has come up as a possible CLV stop in recent years. As Springfield’s metropolitan statistical area, encompassing Greene, Christian, Dallas, Polk and Webster counties, is experiencing the largest population growth statewide, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, Morrow said there was a desire to see another place growing in population and workforce at an even greater rate. Springfield’s MSA increased nearly 14,700 residents – roughly 3.1% – between July 1, 2020, and July 1, 2023, to reach a population of 491,053.

“What we’re looking for is someplace that’s growing its workforce and as a result wages and population faster even than we are and is doing that in a way that might have some parallels that we can identify,” he said, noting Durham’s population has grown 43% over the past decade. “A lot of what they have leveraged well is their strong higher education community and then really taking advantage of that for skills development and population growth and retention. That has resulted in some really high-skill and high-wage jobs. Those are the kinds of things that were really attractive to us.”

The chamber handles logistics for the CLV program, which started in 1994. That includes booking venues and hotels, while attendees pay their own way. Morrow said the Durham trip cost roughly $2,850 per person.

In Durham, the CLV agenda included panel discussions on topics such as downtown revitalization, workforce growth, bridging higher education and employment and transforming spaces through redevelopment.

Intentional focus
For Morrow, one of the goals was to understand how Durham and the greater metro area – which comprise a four-county area called Durham-Chapel Hill, and another three-county area called Raleigh-Cary – are leveraging the higher education influence for stronger private sector development and growth for the region.

“One of the things that was clear was that their higher education institutions had made an intentional focus of increasing their presence in the downtown areas where development needed to happen and doing that as a tenant rather than as an owner,” he said. “That means they can become anchor tenants and derisk deals for developers that would otherwise have a lot on the line for developing new office buildings or new facilities in their downtown or significantly rehabbing or renovating existing buildings for that purpose.”

Morrow noted Missouri State University has increased its presence downtown over the years but said there needs to be more thinking put into identifying institutional entities, including higher education, that would naturally fit downtown.

“How do we do that in a way that creates anchor tenants for developers that can then invest in a way that really raises the quality, caliber and stock of our downtown built environment?” he asked.

In attendance for her fourth CLV, Christina Angle, chief financial officer and vice president of group services with the Erlen Group, said she was impressed with the Research Triangle Park in Durham and how transformational it has been for the region. According to Census Bureau data, the Research Triangle is one of the fastest-growing areas in the U.S., with a population that’s increased 5.6% since 2020 to 2.4 million people.

“They seem to have a good integration between their universities and community colleges and their business community in terms of making sure that the need and the pipeline of students was really well integrated,” she said in an interview with SBJ after the trip.

While she said it’s inspirational to see a finished product like the Research Triangle, opportunities for growth continue for local industrial parks such as Springfield Underground and Partnership Industrial Center West. Erlen Group was created in 2018 as a corporate umbrella for Springfield Underground Inc., according to past Springfield Business Journal reporting.

“We’re a willing private developer, and we’re working well with our public entities to work on the infrastructure piece,” she said.

Past CLV visits have generated some local activity, such as the formation of nonprofit organization Leaders for Ozarks Region Evolvement, which is patterned after a similar organization, the Northwest Arkansas Council. CLV participants learned more about the Arkansas group during its 2022 trip.

Sharing challenges
Both Morrow and CLV attendee Brad Erwin, principal architect with Paragon Architecture LLC, said they appreciated the candor of Durham officials on areas of challenge, such as affordable housing for its workforce. According to data from the Office of Policy Development and Research, which is part of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the median home value in Durham is $430,600, and nearly 75% of its homes are valued over $300,000. In Springfield, the median home value is $166,400, and roughly 62% of the city’s homes are valued $150,000-$300,000.

“Housing costs are much higher now in almost every part of the Research Triangle area, but particularly in Raleigh and Durham,” Morrow said, adding it’s also a challenge in Springfield. “And it has significantly outpaced wage growth, even though their wages in their per capita income are a lot higher than us, too. The buying power, particularly when it comes to housing, is really difficult there and becoming more difficult, especially for those who don’t have the highest-paying jobs in the area.”

Erwin, a 15-time CLV participant, agreed.

“That’s one of the things that they lost sight of, is that as they were achieving this growth and this prosperity, that middle became missing of how to support their workforce,” Erwin said, adding the CLV group heard similar sentiments during a trip to northwest Arkansas in 2022. “That’s one of those things that as we continue to push forward we can’t lose sight of, is that housing for our workforce moving forward is going to look different than the 1950s tract homes that everybody is used to seeing.”

Erwin said it’s a responsibility of the CLV attendees to bring back what they learned to each of their respective organizations, along with any civic or nonprofit boards on which they serve. Part of that knowledge from this trip is to keep a focus on placemaking-type opportunities to make the Springfield area a workforce talent attraction.

“A lot of the growth that’s occurring across the state is occurring in our region,” he said. “And even though that’s a good thing, we need to do better to not only retain that workforce that we have but to continue to track that workforce that we need to support everything great that’s going on here right now.”

While the next destination will take a few months to determine, the work to review possibilities starts almost immediately after the CLV, Morrow said. That research includes reviewing a post-trip survey from all participants that seeks feedback on future locations.