Twenty Reasons to Build and Live In Durham
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Durham is a culturally diverse community. On a scorecard derived from
Dr. Richard Florida’s 2002 bestseller The
Rise of the Creative Class, Durham ranked 1st among 274
similar-sized counties nationwide on the Creativity Index, which
measures the talent, technology, and tolerance within the
community—key, research-proven factors in attracting the creative
class and predicting economic success.
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Durham encompasses Research
Triangle Park and is also home to Duke
and North Carolina
Central universities and Durham
Technical Community College.
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Durham offers neighborhoods from the most upscale in the Triangle like
Treyburn and Hope Valley, to historic neighborhoods like Trinity Park
and Forest Hills, to planned communities like Woodcroft and Woodlake,
to the horse farms and rural neighborhoods of North Durham, to golf
course communities like Croasdaile and Willowhaven, to Downtown lofts
like West Village. Newcomers and visitors can easily find
Durham’s neighborhood organization websites through DCVB's
relocation and neighborhoods portal.
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Durham hit fast-forward without saying good-bye to yesterday… the
Downtown arts and entertainment district was the first commercial
historic district named in North Carolina. Durham has 3
N.C. historic sites (more than any other community) and 60
properties on the National
Register of Historic Places.
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More than 20 Durham restaurants and chefs have received national
or regional recognition. Most of what Money magazine
counted was in Durham when it rated the former six-county
Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill MSA as one of the best places in the nation
to live.
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Durham is home to more than 45 major annual festivals and events, at
least a dozen of which are either highly
recognized—nationally or regionally—or have significant
out-of-state and in-state visitor appeal, including the American
Dance Festival, Bull
Durham Blues Festival, CenterFest
Arts Festival, and Full
Frame Documentary Film Festival.
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Durham offers more
than 60 parks, four major river ways/greenways, a state park, a
state recreation area, several major lakes, and a series of
walking/hiking/ biking trails, including the American Tobacco Trail.
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While Durham
Public Schools is the seventh largest school district in the
state, most are neighborhood schools, nearly all new or recently
renovated, and feature a range of magnet schools, laboratory schools,
and specialization centers. Annual comparisons show that Durham
students perform equally (if not better than) their state peers. The
best Durham schools compete toe-to-toe with the best schools in Cary,
Chapel Hill, or Raleigh.
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Durham has residents who are artists, authors, playwrights,
award-winning scientists and researchers, and people nationally and
internationally renowned in their fields.
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Durham is the City
of Medicine, USA, where one in four people are employed in a
health-related field, with 300 major medical and health-related
companies and medical practices, with a combined payroll that exceeds
$1.5 billion annually.
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Durham is a compact, single-city county at the convenient apex of the
vast Triangle region, midway between Cary, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh.
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More than half of the U.S. population lives within a day’s drive
or an hour’s flight from Durham. Durham is located on both a
major north/south interstate and a major east/west interstate and
co-owns a major
international airport that serves upward of eight million
passengers annually.
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Durham offers some of the state’s most renowned visitor features
and leisure activities including the Durham
Bulls, Duke
University Chapel, Sarah
P. Duke Gardens, three State Historic Sites (including the site of
the largest
surrender of the Civil War), the regional interactive Museum
of Life and Science, four major art centers/museums, a major Civic
Center complex, the Carolina
Theatre, Hayti
Heritage Center, and much more.
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Durham is a center for national championship basketball… North
Carolina Central University in 1989 and Duke adding the 2001
championship to their back-to-back championships in 1991 and ’92.
Duke has been one of the best NCAA Division-I Tournament teams in the
history of college basketball; the Blue Devils' .769 winning
percentage (83-25) in NCAA Tournament play is best all-time.
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Durham has been the home selected by the majority of new business
relocations to the Triangle over the past several years, and Durham is
home to four of the region’s 10 largest employers.
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Durham residents have a strong sense of community pride with more than
77% of residents surveyed proud of Durham. Durham’s single-city
county crime per 100,000 residents has remained relatively flat the
last three years while neighboring communities have risen seven times
as fast. Its crime is near the bottom relative to other midsize cities
in North Carolina and surrounding states. Downtown Durham crime is
among the very lowest in the area.
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Durham offers a splendid array of unique
shopping. The full-size Americana Carousel and more than 165
stores at Northgate have been as staple in Durham for decades. Since
joining Durham’s shopping scene, The Streets at Southpoint, a
1.3-million-square-foot super-regional mall with the state's first
Nordstrom, has made national headlines for its décor, small-town feel,
and upscale items at great values. If you’re looking for
something different, Durham’s unique commercial
districts—Brightleaf and Ninth Street—provide shopping
opportunities to please every taste and budget.
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Durham is a tolerant community. Residents are involved and vocal in
community issues, often making for colorful press and media coverage
of Durham’s vitality and tolerance of differing
opinions—characteristics which are often misunderstood or
mis-represented by of neighboring communities.
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Durham local government has the
highest bond rating available, and this is in part because the
community reinvests in schools, parks, roads, affordable housing, and
other infrastructure. The tax rate can appear higher than other
communities because two of Durham’s major employers are
tax-advantaged and because the community wraps all services into one
tax rate rather than separating parks, etc.
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Durham has fewer traffic problems than surrounding communities. Since
RTP, Duke, and NCCU are all located in Durham County, it is a short,
easy trip from all of these locations to Downtown. RTP is only 4
miles, Duke 2 miles, and NCCU one mile from Downtown.
Last updated 7/11/05
