No bull: Durham stands out as triangle's anchor.

• Author: Burnette, Kristen
• Position: Advertisement

Mention to some folks in the Triangle that you live or work in Durham, and they'll probably fire back a quizzical, "Why?" Why, indeed? The reasons are plentiful.

Durham is home to some of the world's top corporations, healthcare facilities and universities and nationally recognized restaurants. It's in the midst of a comprehensive downtown redevelopment. It's also a national leader for inventions and discoveries, leading the Triangle with 90% of the region's patent filings, according to officials at the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Few cities in North Carolina work as hard as Durham to set the record straight and let folks know what they are really all about. Yet, despite the city's efforts, Durham often still gets a bad rap. And sometimes it's not just bad, it's wrong.

Take, for example, the location of the airport. Although many directories default to Raleigh or Raleigh-Durham, and many individuals refer to "flying into Raleigh," the airport isn't in Raleigh. It's actually midway between Raleigh and Durham and is owned by Durham, Raleigh and Durham and Wake counties. According to Steve Toller, Verizon's vice president of public affairs, "Durham helped launch the airport and is a co-owner. However, cities and airports aren't synonymous."

Then there's Research Triangle Park. It is the name of a 7,000-acre business park, not a city. Many people think it's located between Raleigh and Durham when it's actually surrounded on three sides by Durham County. About 75% of the RTP's property is in the county; as are 93% of its businesses. See why folks in the Bull City get so frustrated by the bull they hear about their city and its namesake county?

Durham takes a lot of heat for its high crime rate, but to put it in perspective, crime in Durham is average, compared with similarly sized cities in the Southeast and the nation. Reyn Bowman, who has made a career out of defending the city as president of its Convention and Visitors Bureau, says Durham got its bad reputation because of faulty statistic Crime rates, for example, are based on the number of crimes per 100,000 people.

"We discovered that Durham's population was severely understated by state planners throughout the 1990s. Based on the incorrect figures used, the city's crime rate was reported high," Bowman says. Once the population data was corrected in 2001, Durham's crime rate was reported as average: In fact, the county's crime rate declined 2% over the 10 years between 1 992 and 2001, while Wake County's increased 17%.

Durham County's public school system, the state's sixth-largest, is often regarded as below par compared with others in the region. But, says Shelly Green, executive vice president of marketing for the CVB, when school scores are broken down by ethnicity and socioeconomic background, Durham's students perform similarly to their peers across the state.

"The fact is that students from poorer socioeconomic groups and nonwhite ethnic groups do not perform as highly on standardized tests as primarily white students from higher socioeconomic groups," Green says. "This is not a Durham issue. This is true all over the country."

Officials say Durham just has a much more diverse culture than most communities. Regardless, the school system has recorded six straight years of improved test scores for all students. And there is an aggressive plan in place to close the achievement gap between the different students during the next five years.

"Durham is taking responsibility to ensure that every child has the highest-quality education throughout the district...