Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy

The sign was eventually replaced. But the dig seemed to be a nod to the alternative metal band Faith No More, whose 1985 hit “We Care a Lot” irreverently skewered the pieties of 1980s politics by sneering at “disasters, fires, floods, and killer bees, about the NASA shuttle falling in the seas, about starvation and the food that LIVE AID bought.”¹ Whoever defaced the RTP sign had a sense of humor, apparently poking fun at the intellectual arrogance of the people who developed new software, pharmaceuticals, and medical treatments in the tree-lined corporate park.

Not far from this sign, in 2001, Durham’s soon-to-be mayor, Bill Bell, walked through a landscape of boarded-up buildings and vacant lots on the city’s West End shortly before taking office. Bell commented on the poverty, underdevelopment, and violence that afflicted this community—a two-year-old girl had died in a drive-by shooting not long before—and pledged his support for “large-scale neighborhood revitalization” in Durham.²

Bell got his wish. The former IBM engineer-turned-politician became mayor in 2001 and oversaw an extraordinary remaking of downtown Durham and its surrounding neighborhoods. Following Bell’s inauguration, “$1.7 billion in public and private investments have flooded the 0.8‐square‐mile area in the form of tech start‐ups, world‐class restaurants, and trendy hotels,” journalist Sarah Willets reported in 2017. “Downtown will add thirteen hundred new housing units in the next few years—ten times the number of units that existed in 1995.”3

At last, it seemed the city of Durham was reaping the benefits of high-tech postindustrial prosperity that the campaign for the Research Triangle had been promising since the late 1950s. Food trucks, cafes, condos—the Bull City had arrived at the “creative” destination that local elites set out for it more than forty years earlier, long before anyone had ever heard of a food truck. The New York Times raved in 2011 about the area’s “design collectives and rehabbed downtowns,” where one hundred fifty thousand college students attended school and a former vegan could be found roasting hogs (presumably organic). The Triangle was North Carolina’s “Axis of Cool,” the newspaper of record declared—akin to Los Angeles’s famous hipster enclave of Silver Lake, only “with a few more ‘yes ma’ams’ ”—reiterating the familiar journalistic trope of liberal modernity sidling up to Southern traditionalism.4

Indeed, the Triangle of the twenty-first century is a quintessential case of answers that raise new questions, solutions that birth new problems. In the early 2000s, the city of Durham seemingly escaped the pattern of deindustrialization, disinvestment, and white flight that had dogged it since the 1960s. There were biotech start-ups and the beautifully refurbished and thoroughly gentrified space of the American Tobacco Campus in downtown. There were breweries and bakeries where, as recently as the late 1990s, few Triangle residents either dared or cared to go. Yet Durham in the era of the knowledge economy also revealed the lacuna of this brave new world—shortcomings that threatened the promise of a high-tech future that would benefit all.

Nearby, Research Triangle Park also found itself facing the perils of success. In the 1950s, the idea of a high-tech hub in the woods between a few small Southern cities in a state still plagued with poverty and Jim Crow might have sounded implausible, at best, to many reasonable ears. The state did not have the benefits of advanced industry, venture capital, world-class universities, or proximity to a major metropolitan area, things that had helped make greater Boston a hearth of the new knowledge economy in the late twentieth century.⁵ Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill boasted some respected colleges and universities—they were not working with nothing—but outsiders, especially from the metropolitan North, were understandably skeptical in the 1950s and 1960s.

Yet the park succeeded in its quest to lure big employers such as IBM and Burroughs Wellcome and, later, the likes of Glaxo and Sumitomo—this in a high-tech update of the time-honored tradition of so-called smokestack hunting. While Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina tilted toward a strategy of winning heavy-industry jobs in auto manufacturing, North Carolina worked assiduously on two tracks: manufacturing jobs for its towns and rural areas, and a concerted focus on high-end services such as finance in Charlotte, tech in the Triangle, and real estate everywhere.⁶

At the end of the twentieth century, RTP could claim “137 organizations with over 41,600 employees, including 104 research companies with over 40,000 research employees” within its sixty-nine hundred acres.7 Notably, the years after 2000 saw a steady uptick in start-ups outside the limits of the park, thanks in part to tech accelerators such as RTP’s AgTech and the efforts of Durham’s Center for Entrepreneurial Development, a nonprofit founded in 1984 to connect potential innovators with investors.⁸ The Triangle metro area had finally succeeded in developing the culture of enterprise and innovation that had largely eluded it in the park’s first forty years, although local venture capital funding remained a shortcoming; in 2014 it still came predominantly from outside the state.⁹

In the new postindustrial world, progress was as Janus-faced as ever. In the age of the hipster, the Triangle had evolved the kind of creative local culture that boosters had somewhat implausibly promised investors in the early 1960s. In the throes of the so-called back-to-the-city movement, Durham and Raleigh filled with young professionals whose parents likely would have eschewed downtowns just a decade or two earlier. Yet each of these successes contained the seed of its own failure: downtown renewal endangered the living standards of long-time residents, who could not afford rising rents and property values, ironic in a metro area long reputed for its affordable cost of living. And hip new start-ups did not necessarily want to locate in the stuffy, sprawling, suburban-corporate landscape of RTP. Instead, they favored greater density and street-level interaction—the very qualities that park planners sought to hammer out of existence in their designs and zoning regulations of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The plan had worked, but it created a new kind of metropolitan economy that no longer fit the dream of midcentury technosuburbia. How local residents and policy makers tackled these challenges speaks to the fundamental paradoxes facing cities, even—or especially—prosperous ones in the twenty-first century.

Indeed, in the early twenty-first century, the Research Triangle seemed to have achieved its original 1950s-era objectives. Corporate laboratories, government agencies, and foundations came to Research Triangle Park and increasingly sprouted up in the surrounding metropolitan area of Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and Cary. Educated workers from around the country and the world migrated there to work and raise families. The metro economy remained resilient, with consistently low unemployment and stable growth even during the recessions of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. (The Triangle weathered the Great Recession of 2008 better than most American metropolitan areas, though the rest of the state, hit by punishing job losses, told a somewhat different story.) Raleigh, Durham, and Cary won plaudits in national media as among the “best places to live” and “most creative” or “brainiest” cities in the country.10

Indeed, Governor Luther Hodges’s goal to “bring in more Ph.D’s than we’ve ever heard of here” came true.¹¹ His gnomic saying in 1962 that RTP was “an idea that produced a reality” seemed apt in the 2000s. It was almost as if North Carolina’s leaders in academia, business, and politics had made the idea a reality by sheer force of will.

Presiding over all this was Bill Bell, the IBM engineer who came to Durham in 1968 and received a frosty reception when he sought to buy a home in the new RTP suburb of Parkwood. Bell subsequently pursued a career in local politics as a county commissioner in the 1970s, and he helped steer the controversial merger of the Durham City and County school systems from 1988 to 1992—a goal delayed long after the City of Raleigh and Wake County merged their own systems over local opposition in the 1970s.12 Around the same time, Parkwood was annexed by the City of Durham in the face of vociferous protests and determined legal challenges. By 2001, Bell was mayor of Durham—as well as Parkwood, the community that at first kind of, sort of rejected him.

In a sense, Bell was the philosopher-king of Durham in the creative age. An IBM engineer, a black man, and an upwardly mobile striver who came to the area during a time of tumultuous social change, he was the quintessential politician for Durham during the time of its rapid revitalization—or gentrification—in the 2000s and 2010s. He proved to be a unifying leader, widely regarded as a capable steward of the city during a time of rapid cultural, demographic, economic, and technological change. (As one prominent Caryite indelicately put it in 2015, “He’s kept everybody down. He’s kept them quiet. If you don’t, they’ll—it’ll all go crazy over there”¹³). Bell oversaw the remaking of downtown Durham, which brought significant new investment in dining and retail and new housing to the city center (figure 6.2).

For Bell, as for the founders of RTP, the outcome looked like pure “gravy” in the early twenty-first century: jobs, growth, rising wages and housing prices. For Bell in particular, his tenure must have felt like a vindication. In the long and troubled story of Durham, ever since he arrived in 1968, the city had managed to chart a course toward revitalization and at least a degree of racial compromise between the long-deadlocked foes of inner-city and suburban Durham. Indeed, the Triangle looked to many observers like the model of a new creative economy. It might not have been as famous or innovative as Silicon Valley or as politically liberal as Massachusetts’s Route 128, but it provided a vision of high-tech suburban prosperity that rivaled any similar metro area in the United States—an economy driven by universities, technology, and an educated middle and upper-middle class. And with a lower cost of living than its peers and Southern charm to spare, the Triangle appeared to be the apotheosis of the new creative economy in its comfiest, most middle-of-the-road iteration.

By the early 2000s, gentrification had gone from an activist buzzword to a fixation of American culture at large. The less privileged and their allies and advocates decried its effect, while gentrifiers—sometimes referred to euphemistically as “urban pioneers”—increasingly used the term in a neutral or even positive way; for instance, “the neighborhood is slowly gentrifying.”16 Typically, gentrification refers to the occupation of a poor or working-class neighborhood by more affluent people who change the cultural profile of a neighborhood—dollar stores replaced by cafés, bodegas by beer bars or bakeries—and drive up property values, making home prices, rents, and taxes unaffordable for the original residents. At times, critics speak of the gentrification of an entire city—say, Washington, D.C., or San Francisco in the early twenty-first century—as demographic change and displacement occur on a larger scale.¹⁷

Yet the Research Triangle represents the gentrification of a multicounty metropolitan area, even the willing of it into existence, a feat of branding that dwarfs the enterprising developers who coined names such as “TriBeCa” and “SoBro” (yes, the South Bronx). The founders of RTP intentionally and openly sought to import educated people with higher incomes to transform Raleigh-Durham and the larger economy that surrounded it.¹⁸

Of course, they could not have called their plan “gentrification”; the word did not exist yet. It first appeared in the New York Times in 1972 in a piece about Londoners who feared the practice of real estate sellers’ taking a deposit from a buyer before promptly increasing the sale price. (“What mugging is to a dinner-party conversation in New York,” the paper reported, “gazumping is in London.”)¹⁹ The word originated in a classic bidding frenzy, as middle- and upper-class Londoners attempted to buy up homes in traditionally working-class areas of the city. The trend can be viewed as an early harbinger of things to come, first in major metropolises such as London and New York—the first New York Times reference to gentrification in a U.S. context followed in 1974—and later in other cities throughout the rust belt and Sunbelt where a combination of deindustrialization, suburbanization, and white flight emptied formerly dense urban communities.²⁰

The South had few big, populous cities prior to the heyday of cars and cul-de-sacs after World War II, but metropoles such as Atlanta continued to witness dramatic shifts of population that moved tax revenue to the suburbs and concentrated poverty closer to downtown in the 1970s and 1980s. Sunbelt cities might have lagged behind New York or London, but they nevertheless saw their own gentrification occur in the late twentieth century—a sort of reverse current of the youngish and educated back into neighborhoods where property values had cratered and schools were viewed as off-limits to anyone fortunate enough to escape them. Consider Atlanta’s Inman Park since the 1980s, or Charlotte’s North Davidson arts district in the 1990s and 2000s.21

The rise of gentrification brought the same ills pretty much everywhere it happened: higher property values improved the local tax base but also increased the tax burden for homeowners and rent for tenants of modest means, eventually outpricing those who had lived in the community the longest. This displacement has received scorn from social critics, long-time residents, and even the original gentrifiers who sometimes cannot afford to stay in their chosen neighborhood. For other newer, more affluent residents, the appeal of urban life—a “back to the city” movement that the New York Times recognized as early as 1974—has often prompted an uneasy acceptance of the inequities that the process is known to cause.

When looking at North Carolina, though, it is perhaps more helpful to think of gentrification not on a neighborhood or even city level but on a regional one. In this sense, North Carolina was itself a poor neighborhood in search of jobs, investment, and tax revenue in the 1950s, when Research Triangle Park was founded. Local elites clearly understood that high-tech development was a vehicle to bring more affluent people and better jobs to the state. Long before the terms gentrification and creative class were in common circulation, North Carolina leaders explicitly set out to gentrify Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill by appealing to an educated, professional workforce.

They succeeded. By most measures, Triangle residents earned higher levels of wages and education by 2000, particularly in the core counties of Durham, Orange, and Wake. Broadly speaking, the numbers speak for themselves. In seven counties of the greater Triangle, population grew dramatically from 1950 to 1990—rising from 419,523 to 889,331, or an increase of nearly 112 percent. By 2010, that number had climbed to 1,634,847 in Chatham, Durham, Franklin, Johnston, Orange, Person, and Wake Counties. A typical male in Chatham County in 1950 had completed 7.4 years of school, with a woman achieving 8.1. By 1990, 70 percent of local residents had at least a high school degree. The same figures were 8.6 for men and 8.9 for women in Durham County in 1950, whereas nearly 80 percent had completed high school or greater in 1990. In more affluent Wake County, men and women had completed 9.2 and 9.9 years of school in 1950, respectively, whereas 85.4 percent had a high school degree or greater in 1990.22

Trends in the early twenty-first century showed an even sharper rise, as university populations and high-tech growth left Durham, Orange, and Wake with a striking proportion of residents holding a bachelor’s degree or greater. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that about 46.9 percent of Durham residents had a bachelor’s degree or higher between 2012 and 2016, compared with 29 percent for the state as a whole, 50.1 percent in Wake, and 57.7 percent in Orange.²³ Incomes followed the same upward trajectory. Wake’s median income in 1950 was $2,011, surpassed only by Durham’s $2,264. By 2010, positions had reversed, with Wake enjoying a median of $63,770 and Durham $49,894.²⁴

These metro areas were the drivers of growth in one of the most rapidly growing states in the United States. North Carolina had “become a magnet for young, well-educated workers who are flocking to cities like Charlotte and Raleigh for jobs in banking, tech and research,” as NPR’s Reema Khrais noted in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. In fact, Wake and Mecklenburg Counties (the latter being the home of Charlotte, the Carolinas’ largest city) accounted for roughly half of the entire state’s growth in the early to mid-2010s.²⁵

Yet with growth and revival inevitably came their cousins, gentrification and displacement. If the cost of living in Durham remained well below that of New York or Los Angeles, it still grew at a rapid clip in the early twenty-first century in a way felt by the most vulnerable Durhamites—especially those of the black working class, who had been abandoned in the city during the age of white flight. Despite the prodigious growth of the city center in the 2000s, inequality increased: the poverty rate rose from 2000 to 2015, 15 percent to 19.2 percent. “From 2000–2001, median rents in Durham went up by 22 percent and median home values by 42 percent,” Sarah Willets reported in 2017, when trends had only accelerated. “The result has been an affordable housing crisis.”26 In a bitter irony, the forces of abandonment and immiseration that characterized many American cities during the age of the urban crisis of the 1970s and 1980s reversed in ways that disadvantaged those who remained.²⁷

The facts are depressingly familiar and not particularly unusual. Economic growth, investment, and in-migration of the more privileged and better-off citizens disrupted the lives of the less-well-off in Raleigh and Durham. The mechanisms are neither obscure nor difficult to understand. People with more money and education come to an older inner suburb or center-city neighborhood. They appreciate the historic built environment or the urban vibe and they buy houses, retooling them and driving up both home values and property taxes. Both renters and homeowners feel the effects in different ways. “We’re building for the whiter, richer new people that are moving to town,” Durham Councilwoman Jillian Johnson, a critic of the unequal impact of development, observed in 2017. “We’re not building grocery stores and pharmacies and banks in east Durham, and that’s what we need to be building.”²⁸

As Tyran Hill, a policy officer at the North Carolina Housing Coalition, pointed out in 2017, development was leaving many low-income and even middle-class families behind. “The more desired locations and areas of Raleigh have a lot more building revitalization going on,” Hill said, “and it makes it a lot more difficult to acquire those lands at a price point in which the fair amount of subsidy and investment that is required would offset those additional land costs that would make it affordable for low income wage workers.” Even as advocates like Hill worked to make affordable housing possible, the escalating prices of in-town real estate made their job doubly difficult. A firefighter in Raleigh had to commute an hour into the city he served because the only housing he could afford was on the urban periphery.²⁹

Meanwhile, some affluent residents of the Triangle were not keen on building new, affordable housing, as a controversy over Habitat for Humanity’s plan to build new units in Cary in 2017 showed, evoking intense local opposition.30 Hill, a member of Habitat for Humanity of Wake County’s Affordable Housing Policy Committee, commented on the thorny politics of privilege and inclusion:

The biggest difficulty when it comes to educating people who have NIMBY [Not in My Backyard] tendencies is that in revitalization and in creating these new units, the fabric of your neighborhood is going to have to change. People don’t want to accept that for whatever reason; they want to maintain that while still benefiting from the financial investments, which is an unrealistic mentality to carry. A lot of people believe that it’s going to bring down their property values, and it’s going to bring crime, and it’s going to increase traffic.…The money line that kept getting used in the council meeting I was in in Cary was, “I’m for Habitat, I love Habitat and building Habitat homes, but I don’t think Habitat belongs here, we should find another place and I will help you build those homes.”³¹

The citizens of Cary were, as ever, fixated on maintaining the architectural and demographic character of their community. Meanwhile, Orange and Durham Counties have made similar efforts to increase the stock of affordable housing through modest increases in property taxes that would fund new housing, but such measures have not kept up with the need for both rental and owner-occupied dwellings in the metro Triangle.³²

The historic communities surrounding downtown Durham have felt this impact more acutely than elsewhere in the Triangle, as the pristine college town of Chapel Hill and the sleepy capital city of Raleigh had experienced white flight less acutely. Older bungalows in central Durham became increasingly desirable to young professionals, much as the lofts of Sharon Zukin’s late 1970s Manhattan or similar housing stock had become in Charlotte or Atlanta in the 2000s. The iconic African American community of Hayti had been bulldozed to make way for the Durham Freeway in the 1960s in a quintessential case of urban renewal gone wrong and partly in an effort to ferry travelers to and from Research Triangle Park. Decades later, those black families who remained faced a new threat of rising costs and neighborhood change.³³

Unsurprisingly, in an era of growing economic inequality that reaches back to the 1970s, economic development in the Triangle has been highly uneven.34 Better jobs, higher wages, and higher levels of education in general have almost indisputably benefited the Triangle and North Carolina as a whole, with multiplier effects for families and communities throughout the state. Yet scholars and policy experts have pointed out that Raleigh and Durham boast some of the greatest economic inequality and lowest social mobility among American metropolitan areas. The gap between the best and worst off has grown within the Triangle, and within the state as a whole, as economic growth has proceeded apace for most of the last fifty years. In fact, residents of the major metropolitan areas of Charlotte, Fayetteville, Greensboro, and Raleigh experience lower economic mobility—the chance that someone born into a lower socioeconomic stratum will move to a higher one—than their peers in 90 percent of other cities.³⁵ Meanwhile, parts of poor and rural North Carolina have infant mortality rates that rival those of much less developed countries; the rate for African American women in eastern North Carolina was 16.6 deaths per thousand births in 2013, versus 5.4 for white women and 5.96 for the nation as a whole across ethnic groups.³⁶

High-tech growth resulted in a distinctly Tar Heel paradox. As columnist Sandy Grady remarked in 1990,

The image of North Carolina as “progressive” is a genteel hoax. Sure, it has a couple of great universities, some good writers, the gleaming towers of Charlotte, the brains of the Research Triangle. But there’s a dark underside: low wages, high infant mortality, subpar schools, low SAT scores. The state’s caught between the Bible Belt and the Sun Belt. Between 1865 and 1990.³⁷

The relentlessly positive coverage of North Carolina in local and national media disguised the dark underside of high-tech postindustrial growth. Both within the metro Triangle and the state of North Carolina, large divisions between the fortunate and the least fortunate have persisted well into the twenty-first century—in spite of high-tech success.

Both the metro Triangle and North Carolina as a whole continue to suffer from wide inequality and persistent poverty despite promising economic growth over decades. Historian Bryant Simon has shown how grinding disadvantages have affected those in rural and small-town North Carolina in his book The Hamlet Fire, about a 1991 accident that killed twenty-five people in a low-wage chicken-processing plant less than two hours from Raleigh.⁴⁰ Even the metropolitan economy of North Carolina’s Piedmont—the cities of Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh, and Durham, where growth has been concentrated in recent decades—has shown signs of falling short in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship.⁴¹ The fact remains that economic growth and technological innovation, while good at raising tax revenues and wages for some, still have not, by themselves, eroded the enduring structure of racial and economic inequality that has defined North Carolina, and the South as a whole, for generations.

Why is it so difficult for a poor child in Durham or Wake or any North Carolina county to climb the ladder to the glittering and sophisticated prosperity so seemingly within reach in nearby RTP? The answers should be no more surprising than the questions. For most of the twentieth century, the political culture of North Carolina celebrated education, science, and progress in general—as well as a stubborn commitment to probusiness conservatism. The history of the Research Triangle is deeply entwined with what historian William Chafe called North Carolina’s “progressive mystique.” The state’s image as more enlightened and moderate than other members of the former Confederacy belied a bedrock of conservatism committed to the maintenance of low wages and little regulation, as state leaders deflected demands for racial or economic justice in the pursuit of investment from outside capital.42

This savvy combination has been key to the success—such as it is—of RTP, the Triangle, and the state. As the late sociologist and state legislator Paul Luebke argued, North Carolina’s leaders have always been split between “traditionalists” and “modernizers.” The former have been more conservative, typically tied to low-tech, labor-intensive industries such as furniture and textiles—and, hence, resolutely antiunion. The latter were nominally more progressive, those with interests in finance, real estate, and, indeed, high technology who might not have been as committed to an antique social order as their more conservative peers but still did not favor the interests of organized labor.⁴³

The founders and captains of RTP—Archie Davis, George Watts Hill, and George Simpson—fell, for the most part, into the modernizer camp. As Doug Edgeton, president and CEO of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, emphasized in 2015, “[North Carolina is] a smart state, a business-friendly low-cost state, with a wide and deep life science infrastructure.”⁴⁴ Behind those words was the whole story: brains plus “low-cost” had long been the Triangle’s formula, and the state’s. Elites could attract jobs and grow the economy, but they showed relatively little interest in taking on the woeful conditions of many workers or the ingrained structural poverty across the state in a serious way.⁴⁵

The Triangle also has come up short on more prosaic measures that do not have to do with life and death so much as growth and investment. RTP has drawn major employers and in-migrants from outside the state, but besides a few major firms such as SAS (founded in 1976) or Quintiles (1982), it has not historically generated a great deal of local innovation, at least in the late twentieth century. This deficit began to diminish in the 2000s as more start-ups emerged in Raleigh and Durham with the help of the Council for Entrepreneurial Development (CED), which was founded in 1984 and aimed to support innovation and channel investment to start-up firms.46 But unlike Boston and San Francisco, the Triangle has spun off relatively few major companies or new technologies. AZT might have been developed as an HIV drug there, AstroTurf and Ctrl+Alt+Delete might have come from the minds employed at RTP, but they did not generate the kind of entrepreneurial activity that builds dense local networks of partnership and collaboration and keeps profits within the local economy.⁴⁷

Scholars have advanced a few reasons for the laggard aspect of the Triangle. One is a lack of venture capital. Compared with Boston, San Francisco, and New York, a limited amount of investment was available in a chronically poor state like North Carolina to promote local entrepreneurs who had an idea and a vision. The Triangle simply did not produce the likes of Hewlett-Packard (1939), Apple (1976), or Google (1998) in the San Francisco Bay Area or Biogen (1978) in greater Boston. “You need a lot of filthy-rich people who are willing to gamble, knowing that nine out of the ten things that they invest in are gonna be bombs but one out of ten they’re gonna get a great return,” Chuck Till observed, comparing his experience with that of friends and peers in California. “I still don’t think you got a lot of that in North Carolina.” Moreover, as geographer William Graves argued, Southern bankers traditionally have had a conservative and risk-averse approach to investing in chancy new enterprises, unlike their counterparts in the Northeast or West Coast.⁴⁸ “RTP clearly is in but not of the South,” geographer Susan Walcott concluded in 2001, “a global node station whose affluence assists the state coffers but exists more as an island than an example of Carolina dynamism.” Like Graves, she credited “a paucity of local financiers” with inhibiting the “difficult transition” to a truly dynamic local economy.⁴⁹ Hence, what finance capital existed in Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte, or Winston-Salem was not necessarily forthcoming.

In fact, RTP represents, if nothing else, the greatest success of venture capital in North Carolina’s history. That was evidenced when Archie Davis and George Watts Hill managed to scare up enough money from bankers, industrialists, and other businesspeople across the state in 1959 to buy out the original investor, New York textile magnate Karl Robbins, and put RTP on a sound financial footing as a nonprofit. Those donors were the original angel investors.50

Finally, the relative job security offered by the Triangle might, by itself, have inhibited potential entrepreneurship. Jim Goodnight was a researcher at NC State when he conceived of launching SAS Institute, but he did not enjoy the privilege of tenure, of a more or less guaranteed lifetime job; he and his compatriots were willing to set off and try something new. Professors at UNC or Duke could have started their own businesses to commercialize new technologies, but leaving behind a stable salary and benefits was a disincentive. Meanwhile, RTP had focused on recruiting huge corporate employers that also guaranteed generous benefits, such as IBM. And SAS ironically became a symptom of the problem itself: the lavish rewards of working there and solicitous attitude of managers toward work-life balance meant that loyal workers were unlikely to disembark for possibly greener, but still riskier shores. “[SAS is] a very comfortable place for a lot of people, and they don’t really have—they don’t have the energy, effort, or impetus to go leave,” as the CED’s Jay Bigelow put it. “It’s not cutthroat.”⁵¹ The Triangle’s historical reliance on a handful of big corporations might have smothered the potential for start-up innovation.

For all these reasons, the Triangle has not managed to hatch new industries—as Romeo Guest dreamed of in the earliest days of the Triangle in 1954—in the same way as Boston, Austin, or the Bay Area.⁵²

Florida proposed that a new class was coming to the fore—indeed, one that already had taken what Marxists might call the hegemonic position in a changing society.⁵⁴ Old distinctions between the poor, working class, middle class, and elite were being superseded by a new group: the broad swath of workers who used their intellect and creativity primarily on the job, from the barista in a band to the computer programmer to the visionary CEO. United in the fact that their work required more thinking than rote repetition, they were the vanguard of a new economy and a new class paradigm.

Florida’s message was, in many ways, a sugar high too great to resist. Cities that had lost investment, jobs, and population in the late twentieth-century wave of deindustrialization and financialization of the U.S. economy, like his beloved Pittsburgh, could look to the author’s prescriptions for a ray of hope.⁵⁵ Focus on cultivating a tolerant, interesting local environment, with coffee shops, art galleries, and gay pride parades, Florida argued; then a city could lure the educated workers who would refill depleted urban tax coffers, drive up property values, and make old downtowns thrive again. Anxious local leaders across the United States took up the message, and Florida was suddenly a consultant whose services could help Green Bay, Wisconsin, or Memphis, Tennessee, become more “creative.”⁵⁶ If his message was perhaps too easy—slap a pride sticker on your lonely burg and the techies will come a-calling—it also was not entirely wrong. Many American cities did, in fact, see a major revival in the early twenty-first century, a trend that, arguably, Florida intuited sooner than many others.⁵⁷

Durham is a perfect example. It was a postindustrial city, in the sense that its tobacco-processing industry had declined rapidly so that by 1987, American Tobacco had left downtown and basically vanished by the time Liggett & Myers departed the city in 2000. Meanwhile, its downtown had languished as white flight led the whiter and more affluent citizens to suburban Durham or Wake County.58 In the years after 2000, though, the change in Durham was striking: coffee shops, whiskey bars, music venues, breweries, new apartments, and all the accoutrements of urban revival found in basically every other gentrifying city in the United States. In moves rich with symbolism, both Brightleaf Square in 1981 and the American Tobacco Campus in 2004—“the largest historic preservation in the history of North Carolina,” according to planning scholar William M. Rohe—reoccupied old warehouses with new retail and dining spaces, much as textile mills and other factories had been repurposed in cities like New York and Gastonia.⁵⁹

Durham was creative; it had strong universities, educated workers, and arts institutions; and the people and businesses came. In fact, the pioneers of RTP—most of which was in Durham County but remained insulated from annexation by the city because state legislators passed a 1985 law forbidding it—had anticipated all this change with a kind of breathtaking foresight.⁶⁰ Forty-five years before The Rise of the Creative Class, men such as Romeo Guest and George Simpson argued that North Carolina needed to leverage its cultural and intellectual resources to lure both educated workers and more technologically advanced companies to the state. Museums, theater, art, and, above all, universities were the keys to attracting brains, which the Triangle’s early boosters saw as the key to development. They were Florida long before Florida.

Where has this prescient economic development strategy left the Triangle, and North Carolina as a whole? One problem with writing about the Triangle is that almost no one is willing to say anything bad about it. The relentlessly cheerful booster spirit of Romeo Guest, George Simpson, Luther Hodges, George Watts Hill, and Archie Davis has soaked into the metropolitan fabric of the Triangle in many regards. Activists make noise about the lack of affordable housing, the problems of traffic and sprawl, and the yawning gap of racial and overall economic inequality in the metro Triangle. But in general the region in the twenty-first century mirrors the loving national media coverage it has managed to attract and cultivate since the 1990s: a robust recipe of smart and creative people, economic growth, easy living, and political moderation.

In fact, Florida found the Triangle wanting in terms of creativity in his 2002 book. “The Research Triangle lacks the ‘hip’ urban lifestyle found in places like San Francisco, Seattle, New York and Chicago,” he wrote, citing a researcher at the University of North Carolina who rued that the only fun local activity was to “visit the hog farms.”61 Its boring suburbia and sprawl rendered it less delectable than San Francisco’s Mission District or other paradigmatic cases of the hip new capitalism. The urbanist reassessed his views in later years, however, naming Durham–Chapel Hill as the second “brainiest” metro in America in a 2010 Daily Beast report.⁶²

At the same time, rival urbanist Joel Kotkin consistently made a different case: that the prosperous, if sometimes dull, suburbs of cities such as Raleigh, as well as Dallas and Salt Lake City, represented the vanguard of twenty-first-century urbanism.⁶³ As metastasizing housing prices in so-called global cities such as New York and Los Angeles drove out all but a small elite, Kotkin insisted that the main action of American life would happen in sprawling and increasingly diverse suburbs in the twenty-first century.⁶⁴ “In the coming decades the ‘luxury city’ may be a place with a significant increase in high-end dwellings but not many more people,” Kotkin argued in 2010, noting that a $50,000 income bought more than twice as much house in Atlanta as in New York. “Over the past few decades even educated workers, particularly when they enter their thirties, have tended in increasing numbers to leave more expensive cities for less expensive cities like Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, and Raleigh-Durham.”⁶⁵

In fact, the Triangle of the twenty-first century sat in something of a middle spot between Florida and Kotkin’s competing visions of creative cities and family-friendly suburbs. “From its biscuits to its boutiques,” as one New York Times profile said in 2009, “the Triangle occupies a happy place between slow-paced Southern charm and urban cool.”66 Its radically dispersed population—among the lowest-density metro areas in the United States—might have meant traffic, but it also led to relatively lower housing prices than other major cities and the possibility of having a comfortable, serene suburban life as a tech worker in Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary, or their more distant surrounding counties.⁶⁷

In the end, New York Times pundit David Brooks might have had the better part of the argument. The Triangle was the land of his “bobos”—bourgeois bohemians—who enjoyed both high levels of education and professional attainment as well as a taste for the arts and culture. Brooks introduced the term in his 2000 Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How It Got There, a book that was at least as insightful as Rise of the Creative Class. With a jaundiced but none-too-secretly loving eye, Brooks looked at the hard-working strivers who pursued higher education and won a place in corporate America and the professions.⁶⁸ They were the “knowledge workers” about whom management theorist Peter Drucker and sociologist Daniel Bell talked in the 1960s and 1970s, the symbolic analysts who economist Robert Reich wrote about in his 1992 The Work of Nations, and the creative class that Florida popularized in 2002.⁶⁹ Whatever name you choose—knowledge worker, creative, bobo—the Triangle was a place tailor-made for them.

As a consciously contrived place, it seemed to have realized its goal of a perfect, antiseptic space for research, innovation, and contemplative thought. RTP represented midcentury modernism at both its finest and most pedestrian. As the writers of VICE magazine remarked in 2005, “Sorry, dude, but the future is slick and modernist. If you really want to get futury go back to the late 50s.”70 That is RTP at its core.

Yet the park faces serious challenges in the new century. It remains dependent on large corporate tenants, which could lay off large numbers of employees—as IBM did during the Great Recession in 2010—or, worse, leave entirely.⁷¹ In this sense, RTP falls into a longer Southern history of efforts by states and localities to recruit employers from outside the region for the basic reasons of jobs and investment rather than fostering local entrepreneurship.

More relevant, though, is the legacy of the park’s rigorously corporate-suburban aesthetic. What appealed to executives, scientists, engineers, and planners in the 1960s is not necessarily the cutting edge of development or tech in the twenty-first century. The Jane Jacobs–inspired vogue for density, interaction, and walkability embodied by the movement for “new urbanism” runs counter to the regimented, clean, separated look of RTP.⁷² When the park began to evolve, corporate leaders wanted to have their workers cordoned off in discrete fiefdoms, with little more than a few pine trees lining the road, a company logo at the entrance, and a secured gate for entry to their suburban campuses. Interacting and intermingling were not encouraged, so much so that for much of RTP’s history, there were barely any coffee shops, bars, or restaurants within easy reach of the park and its employees.

In the twenty-first century, RTP’s leaders recognized this quandary. The zoning rules and property covenants that governed the park strongly inhibited the development of any housing or retail within its space, but RTP President Bob Geolas wanted to change that. “It’s kind of an old model,” Geolas admitted in 2016.

Planners aimed to reformat the park for a way of living and working that departs sharply from the big corporate campuses of the 1960s (figure 6.3). The first step was the Frontier, a project launched in 2015 that rehabilitated several older office buildings as a space for start-ups and coworking. Gone were the single employers that occupied a low-density footprint on a lush, suburban lawn; instead, entrepreneurs and inventors could interact in fluid, shared, open spaces, and new firms could perfect their technologies in a low-cost setting before raising the capital to take a product to market and move into larger environs. Inside, bulletin boards enticed workers to running clubs and movie nights, and people from multiple firms milled around the same coffee machine. Outside, a Cuban food truck offered its treats in the parking lot. There were kickboxing classes and happy hours with free beer on Thursdays. Such changes reflected a conscious intention to model space after an idea of what a funky, Floridian environment of innovation in New York or San Francisco might look like. RTP’s leaders want to remake at least part of the park around the virtues of interaction and collaboration, in contrast to the model of older research and development firms that wished to keep workers separated in order to protect intellectual property and other corporate secrets.⁷⁴

Just as important, a new Park Center aims to give RTP a promenade it never had, a core and a sense of place. “A trip through RTP always feels Orwellian,” journalist Lisa Sorg noted in 2015, nodding to “large, somber buildings veiled by noble stands of pine trees” and “blocky, corporate mausoleums.”75 But the Frontier and the Park Center are meant to diminish, at least, a feeling of chilly absence that many visitors to the park have reported over the years. Planners envision a Park Center with dining and retail, grocery stores, housing, and hotels, all in a walkable space not far from where I-40 cuts through the heart of RTP. In a historical irony, the park’s founders considered building a “science city” with its own on-site housing and amenities in the late 1950s before quickly shelving the idea. In the twenty-first century, RTP aims to remake itself in just such a way, “to offer the kinds of ‘experiences,’ ” as Geolas put it, that contemporary tech workers allegedly crave.⁷⁶

It remains to be seen whether the ambitious redesign of RTP can transform its place within the sprawling metropolitan landscape of the Triangle, as start-ups pop up in downtown Durham and Raleigh and residents are vexed ever more by the woes of traffic. In an ideal world, the Park Center would become a desirable destination in its own right, a central node within a denser and better-connected Triangle. In 2020 there are hopes—which have been routinely dashed since the 1980s—that significant mass transit such as light rail could interconnect the municipalities of Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham with RTP, although the political logistics of working out a plan with multiple cities, counties, the state, and the federal government have long impeded progress. The issues of traffic, sprawl, unaffordable housing, and economic inequality continue to pose serious challenges to the Triangle’s future as a prosperous and equitable place for all its residents.⁷⁷

In the end, RTP has the curious distinction of being an almost axiomatically successful effort to create a somewhere from whole cloth, at branding a place—“the Triangle,” a term that did not exist prior to 1954, has come to define the entire metro area—but it resulted in an absence at its core. Countless visitors to the region have driven through RTP and wondered how they missed seeing it, because the stands of pines and endless driveways to corporate office parks do not strike them as a place in any meaningful sense.⁷⁸

In the twenty-first century, park officials hope to manufacture a new identity within RTP’s suburban lanes of sterile corporate campuses, in much the way that its original boosters invented the idea of the Research Triangle from basically nothing in the 1950s. Whether or not the effort succeeds is difficult to predict, but the trends of contemporary urbanism and tech investment run toward density, agglomeration, and walkability instead of sprawl and sterility. At the same time, though, Kotkin and Brooks are correct to recognize that the suburban life remains appealing to many of the people who will work in the software and biotech firms of the Triangle, much as it did for their precursors in the 1970s or 1980s. In that sense, the Triangle struck a critical balance between urban and suburban—at least for a privileged group of knowledge workers, now known as the creative class. Or, as RTP’s Kristie VanAuken put it in 2018: “The value proposition here is right in the sweet spot.”79

Can RTP and the Triangle as a whole overcome the shortcomings of the region’s original 1950s vision? Can high-tech development not only produce better jobs, higher wages, and worthwhile innovations but also result in a broad-based prosperity that includes as many people as possible across a constellation of diverse communities?

The answer lies in the nature of what some scholars have called “cognitive capitalism,” an economy driven by immaterial labor and the production of similarly abstract goods: affect and information.80 Since at least the 1960s, many thinkers have pondered what a future economy and a future city might look like, especially if automation and other new technologies were to supplant older, manual labor jobs and result in a new kind of political economy. As manufacturing diminished as a proportion of employment in the United States, industries such as education, entertainment, and software accounted for an increasing number of workers in the late twentieth century.⁸¹ Whether they are called “knowledge workers,” a “new class,” “symbolic analysts,” or the “creative class,” there is clearly a segment of the workforce that is more educated and lives and works in a manner that is different from that of the past. And since the 1950s, American cities and suburbs have pursued those workers for both their cultural cachet and the potential tax revenue they might generate.

In this book I have argued that the rise of this cognitive capitalism has been too little recognized by scholars and policy makers. Or, if it has been acknowledged, observers have treated its emergence too often as something natural or inevitable—the logical outcome of economic and technological developments of postindustrial capitalism in the late twentieth century. Rather, RTP illustrates that this new political economy was part of a concerted cultural project, one that explicitly valued certain types of labor and industries—and, by extension, certain kinds of people—as more important than others.

The Triangle is perhaps the most representative and unique example of a deliberate attempt to create a landscape expressly intended for education, research, and innovation—in short, “brains,” the Triangle itself being a “brain magnet.” The late-twentieth-century effort to retool the national economy toward postindustrial ends was hardly unique to North Carolina. Since the 1970s, the quest for the knowledge economy has swept America, from Cambridge to Raleigh, to Salt Lake City, to Seattle.⁸² Austin in particular mirrors the Triangle model, with the centrality of the University of Texas to its postindustrial boom in the late twentieth century; the city’s preference for light, nonpolluting industries; and its persistent pattern of racial and class inequality, as geographer Eliot M. Tretter has argued.⁸³ In the Research Triangle, as in Austin, universities were the magic totem for creating a metropolitan economy based on creativity, intellect, and knowledge—the key forces in a political economy that not only valorized knowledge production but lent privilege to its makers as a core component of the blueprint for the future.

This vision of a new economy emerged, unlikely as it may seem, among a handful of academics, bankers, and politicians in the Jim Crow North Carolina of the 1950s. If, as political scientist V. O. Key said in the 1940s, the North Carolina of that era was run for the benefit of a “progressive plutocracy,” we might say its post-1960s political economy was organized around a progressive bobo-ocracy, exemplified by nothing so perfectly as the Research Triangle, and perhaps the banker suburbs of Charlotte.⁸⁴

Questions of equity and social justice remain unremittingly present amid the twenty-first-century celebration of creativity and urban revival in Raleigh and Durham. And although the Triangle’s problems stem, significantly, from the South’s own historical legacy of economic and racial injustice, it is hardly an outlier. In the early years of the twenty-first century, a robust discussion broke out about inequality across the tech world, particularly Silicon Valley. Critics increasingly pointed out that racial and gender imbalances pervade employment in the most cutting-edge firms, with women, African Americans, and Latinos highly underrepresented. Meanwhile, the glaring economic divide between the best-educated and most affluent knowledge workers and everyone else became impossible to ignore as gentrification unfolded in cities from the 1970s onward. Sharp and sharpening inequities, in short, could be found both within the high-tech industry itself and across the broader metropolitan landscape.85

This widening gap was as impossible to ignore in the 2010s as it had been in prior decades, as Google buses roamed the streets of San Francisco and Mountain View, ferrying employees to and fro. Frustrated locals even took to blocking roads and throwing rocks at the buses in 2013 and again in 2018; they were fed up with skyrocketing housing prices and the privatized transit system enjoyed by their tech betters. “Warning: Two Tiered System,” protesters declared, while another sign put a sharper point on the message: “Die techie scum. No one wants you here.”⁸⁶ In 2016, the Bay Area boasted the third highest level of income inequality of any metropolitan area in the nation—with San Francisco, formerly a working-class port city and stronghold of cultural and political radicalism, becoming iconic as the acme of tech success.⁸⁷ Inequality, it could be said, is more a feature of the knowledge economy than a bug.