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Camden New Jersey – Is It Our Future?

By: kowalski (Diary)  |  January 18th, 2011 at 07:13 PM  | 

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I keep looking at what’s happening in Camden, NJ and I just can’t believe what I’m seeing there.  Or maybe I do believe it and I knew it was coming, but I can’t believe it was allowed to reach this point.

For those of you who haven’t been following the apocalyptic tale of Camden, you can find a lot of the reports on Drudge.  They just laid off something like half the police force and firefighters there, in a town run by criminals, and the actual totals almost don’t matter.  Half of the city lives below the poverty line, all the manufacturing jobs that used to form the pillars of what Camden was have left for parts South and East, or at least elsewhere, and the violent crime rate is already 5 times the national average.  Before the layoffs.

You’re seriously talking about a place in America – right on the East Coast – where the illegal immigrants currently in the city should be thinking hard about going back to Juarez voluntarily (nobody is going to kick them out, not in Camden) — because it’s safer and the jobs and life expectancy are better there.

It’s fair to say that Camden is a city being lived in by people who cannot afford to leave, lorded over by thugs running drugs, with a political class that is clinging to life by the thinnest of reeds.  It’s a city that was kept on life support by the taxpayers of New Jersey for many years, while everything worthwhile about living there got up and was lost hell and gone.  And now the money has run out – all of New Jersey’s money has run out (the casinos there have sucked wind for the past 3 years) and Camden is facing an implosion and it could be a very violent implosion.

I look at Camden and I don’t see an outlying phenomenon, though.  I see it as becoming much more mainstream for a lot of places in America.  Where would the people in Camden go if it wasn’t for Camden?  Some of them might like to leave, but how?  What will they build there?  Another casino?  What jobs will they get to finance their exodus?  What surrounding town is willing to absorb the blight of Camden and take on the burdens of a failed city within what until recently was called one of the most prosperous states in America?

We’ve got the rot eating away at us right in the middle of some of the most prosperous areas in our country, and nobody seems to know what to do about it.  Our best answers so far seem to be to try and find jobs in casinos (which is what they mean by “hospitality”) or health care.  So…we’re going to be working to lose money to the State or try to maintain people in increasingly poor health, at greater and greater expense.

These things don’t sound to me like a recipe for a society that can rebound from the bust of the housing market bubble.  I really don’t think there’s anything in America left to replace that last one:  you were talking about a massive failure of the market in the realest of the real property – people’s homes.  Everyone who knows seems to say that we won’t see significant unemployment declines for something like 5 years or more, if ever.  How can a city like Camden ever rebound if that’s true?  How can America?  What will happen to all the people there?

Everyone is watching Camden right now in a kind of morbid fascination about how far and quickly the cancer will spread, how many other cities around the country will go the same way, and what the aftermath of it will be, like some kind of necromantic curiosity.    But there are real people there.  Some of them are still alive.  Many of them were victims of circumstance and are good people.  What will happen if the rest of the country goes this way?

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  • renny

    And remember, for decades, the citizens of Camden used Halloween as an excuse to burn down most of the city. Until they built a state penitentiary across the Street, the Walt Whitman Museum once stood on Mickle Street (major highway) so isolated you could practically see from horizon to horizon within Camden itself.
    Once the home of RCA and Campbell Soup, Camden offers now not much except proximity to Phila, (does have an aquarium) and so the former Del River factories and buildings are being rapidly turned into housing with a river view, but that’s not sustaining business.
    1/2 the fire and police are being laid off. But look at Detroit, the city is leasing out denuded blocks for farming in order not to contract the city’s boundaries. 1/2 its schools will likely be closed.
    One unmentionable thing these two cities have in common is their black administrations for decades did all possible to ruin the cities from corruption to high crime.
    Newark, also once depressed ever since the riots of 1967, is FINALLY, 40 years later, showing some life and seems to have a real mayor who was, unlike Bloomberg in NYC, out in the blizzard shoveling snow and arranging emergency services himself right after Christmas. We can only hope he will be successful.

  • eastbaylarry

    sweep across America?

    I live in California, so this is not an idle question.

  • JadedByPolitics

    When you make it unpalatable to do business in NJ and the businesses leave, where did they think the tax base was going to come from? oh yeah they thought they could continue to rape the rich and “spread the wealth” and the rest of the State would send money their way. It is a shame and it is sad but it was predictable and all those Democrats who raided the pot and bought their luxury homes outside of Camden while they threw money at the unions for lavish retirement benefits that was a fools errand are long gone and the only people left are the poor and downtrodden….hell…look at Detroit or Baltimore or any City run by a conglomerate of Democrats and they are all falling apart.

  • jdw4america

    Whenever it seems as if a democrat controlled city is about to go under due to their own pillaging and that of their unions, they pull something like laying off firefighters and police officers. Are these the only public employees they could find to axe? Well no, but it puts the citizenry at greatest risk, thereby adding blackmail to their crimes.

    I can only hope that the Governor does the right thing and doesn’t bail them out. I’m sorry for the people of Camden. I see the danger coming to New York but there’s no way to stop it. The country can’t bail out every city and state corrupted by the culture of dependency.

    • gekster

      Budget shortfall and so laid off state police and prison guards.
      It’s in the playbook.

    • pilgrim

      Every time there are needs to rein in the spending because the Ds in power of a city or a state have over-promised and over-extended they will lay off the fireman of the year or the policeman of the year so everyone will feel guilt and pity. They play us for fools, and too many continue to fall for it.

  • JSobieski

    Although Detroit city government has never had better leadership in my lifetime than it has now.

    The growth of these 3rd world economic zones in what were once proud cities is something truly sad.

  • tedpomeroy

    Throw in Newark, Paterson, Hackensack, the Abbot school districts to Camden.

    These are cities and municipalities that cannot raise enough money to police their city, operate their schools and in the case of Paterson and Hackensack,
    operate an adequate sewer system. What these cities are for is being census builders for the Democrats in New Jersey. These cities are totally dependent on funds from others through Trenton and Washington.

    When we change control of the Legislature in Trenton, if it takes a NJ Constitional amendment we need to disincorporate cities and towns that cannot pay their bills. They would then be townships of their respective counties.

    If you eliminate all of the local “yahoo” politician opportunities that these cities present, then you can make some progress.

    We Saps in New Jersey in 2009 voted to tax ourselves for “Open Space”.
    We can use these funds in order to tear down sub standard housing in these cities in order to make them more economical to police.

    These cities and towns are not entitled to Home Rule!

  • Jim Moss

    For Camden, Detroit, and so many other place, the root cause of all this is jobs that went sailing overseas, never to return. And that blame can go on Democrats and Republicans. Both parties have consistently supported this trend.

    • earlgrey

      kept businesses from investing in the US. Regulations, taxes, regulations, taxes, unions, regulations, unions, corrupt local politicians, taxes, mandates, etc (with a few more taxes and unions thrown in ).

      • Jim Moss

        I think an anti-business environment is one of many factors. But the real issue goes deeper. It gets put on a pro-business vs. anti-business spectrum, but that’s over-simplified. The government has long been in favor of large multi-national companies that have no local loyalties and will move wherever they can get the cheapest labor and the lowest operating costs – whether it’s the next state over or halfway around the world. Despite consistent rhetoric lionizing the small businessman, the government has been steadily against the interest of small businesses, who will have those local loyalties and are much more important for the long-term stabilitiy of a community.

    • renny

      All the problems of NJ cities from Newark to Paterson to Camden go back to the riots everyone thought were justifiable outrage (or the news did), but when they burned down local businesses and stole from their neighbor’s stores, the proprietors and business people left and never came back. The middle class that could get out also left. My drive was paved for the first time by a family that left Newark and started an asphalt business in the suburbs, And they are still here.

      • tedpomeroy

        After World II following all the way up to the riot, the stark facts were there were two great migrations. Blacks were moving into Newark and Italians & Irish were moving out. The Italians were able to hold onto political control of Newark in the 1960′s. The city had rent control so no apartment house builder would build new rental housing. The construction trade was heavily unionized and corrupt so it never paid to build something new anyway. The Irish still held on the plum union jobs of the police force and fire department.

        The Black immigrants needed housing, what they got was housing discrimination from Italians and Irish. They needed jobs but much of employment was all locked up and they were not welcome in the unions be they municipal or private.

        President Lyndon Johnson told the Newark Blacks that they were victims and the the Great Society would save them. MLK seconded it.
        So they rioted.

  • http://www.800cart.com Ron Robinson
  • itrytobenice

    What a coincidence that all these blue states and cities are sinking under a burden of crime, taxes, poor business environment, et al. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that democrats are so incompetent they’re not capable of managing the prosperity of a small city, let alone a country.