Camden, New Jersey: America's Most Desperate Town
m.rollingstone.com
m.rollingstone.com
1. Legalize drugs. Allow local municipalities to regulate and tax recreational substances. Boom. You have an instant local revenue stream, the police are suddenly out of the business of arresting people for "possession", and can focus more on violent crime, domestic disturbances, etc. In the short term, drug-funded gangs will turn to theft and robbery to stay in business, but anyway a major, relatively safe and easy source of revenue will be gone.
2. Declare certain urban areas to be economic development zones with drastically reduced taxes and regulations. Make it dirt cheap to locate factories and plants there. Provide start-up grants to local entrepreneurs, with real oversight, not just feel-good handouts. Lower the barriers to business start-ups and there will be business activity, and it will accelerate as the cycle of crime and poverty is reduced.
3. Fix the K-12 schools. Double the teachers' pay, double the security around the schools and provide secure bus rides to and from the projects and tenements. Make the school day longer, and ratchet up the standards. Demand higher achievement, and don't let a kid just flunk and walk away; make them re-take, make them realize the importance. Make school a destination, not a chore.
Teach democracy in the schools. Emphasize basic literacy skills, ethics and morality, history, how to speak and write properly, mathematics and science. Make the schools the best in the state in terms of standards.
These are all easier said than done, but can we afford to do anything less? We have spent trillions of dollars trying to fix similar problems in other countries, so why not spend a tenth of that or a thousandth of that fixing some of the problems in our own country?
I've always thought the troops should be brought home and all those trillions spent on infrastructure and community projects within America.
Unfortunately, it's more important to spend trillions on other countries than on America and Americans.
"If Americans knew what Swedes receive for their taxes, we would probably riot."
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?artic...
Clarification (I agree with your gist), that money gets funneled through the military industrial complex back into "construction companies" (i.e., haliburton), security companies (i.e., Blackwater/XE) and various other US-based corporate socialism babies.
Very little of foreign development money is actually seen by the countries we "occupy" or "assist". Please see Confessions of an economic hit man for more details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_...
These areas are already very cheap to build in. Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey practically give away abandoned industrial sites hoping to find companies to take them over. Getting rid of regulations can be iffy. After all, the outputs of polluting activities in Camden flow down the Delaware River to a whole bunch of other people.
Fixing education in these communities is intractable. You can't teach kids in a community where gang leaders have more authority than parents. You have to fix the community before you can make a dent in the education problem.
Cheap buildings aren't enough. You need a full stack, top to bottom, crash program to attract businesses and encourage local entrepreneurship. A special economic zone means low or no taxes for X years, little or no regulatory interference (e.g., zoning laws, architectural requirements, ethnic/gender hiring mandates, union lock-in, etc.), just basically leave them alone and let them build a business in a war zone. Of course, you can't simply suspend OSHA, ADA, and anti-discrimination laws, but if you can make it cheap enough to conduct business, the incentives will outweigh the danger and inconvenience and they will come.
Local police investigators have confirmed that many individuals who have been apprehended for robberies were previously involved in the local drug trade.
(As an aside, can we stop with this "regulate and tax" boot-kissing of politicians? We all know that's how they stick their grubby fingers into everything and ruin it; there's no need to encourage it)
Also, while this article focuses on the progress being made by the police, if you switch your perspective and imagine yourself living there, it pretty much sounds like the beginnings of a standard sci-fi dystopia.
Taxes on drugs are a small price to pay if it furthers legalization.
Pragmatically, it wouldn't simply legitimize the current drug dealers overnight. You'd have to sell them on bullshit paperwork and becoming part of a system that they're predisposed to hate. Good luck with that.
Also the more complexity that goes into "appropriate" regulation, the more likely that specific (ie used by the upper classes) drugs will be the only ones that get deillegalized. Which will fail to address the actual problem at all.
> "Also the more complexity that goes into "appropriate" regulation, the more likely that specific (ie used by the upper classes) drugs will be the only ones that get deillegalized. Which will fail to address the actual problem at all."
The entire class of "we're only legalizing 'upper class' drugs" arguments are complete nonsense. The fact is that disadvantaged minorities are massively over-represented in marijuana arrests, despite using marijuana at similar rates as white americans.
> "But promoting it as an integral part of the solution helps perpetuate the same tired government-should-be-involved thinking that caused the problem in the first place."
We've got bigger fish to fry. Drug laws are modern Jim Crow laws, concerns about the merits of taxing vices and luxuries have a lower priority.
And who do you think that that society is structured around?
> allow other people
"Other people" are going to invest capital in Camden to setup a single-serving storefront that will be violently attacked by vertically-integrated competition? Sure..
There is already a mature market in place, and you're saying the right way is to create a different one and hope that the consumers switch. Maybe that works in theory, right up until junkies start getting beat up for breaking rank and going to the sellout drug store.
> we're only legalizing 'upper class' drugs" arguments are complete nonsense
It's not a claim that upper classes are the most affected by pot being illegal, it's that pot being illegal is something that actually affects the upper classes. Please show me a seriously-taken proposal to "legalize and regulate" pot, cocaine, crack and meth alike. This will never happen, and the Jim Crow laws will continue just fine without pot.
> And who do you think that that society is structured around?
That society, if you can even call it one, is the very thing that legalization is designed to destroy. Hardened criminals hiring 13 year olds to deal off street-corners to make some cash to pay for their siblings groceries is a self-destructive local-maxima.
If you want to understand legalization, then you need be able to understand a society free of the influences of discrimination enabling drug laws. We want to not break up social structures and support in the first place.
> "This will never happen, and the Jim Crow laws will continue just fine without pot."
Well no, they wouldn't. See: the massive amount of black people jailed for marijuana alone. Nothing is a full-proof silver bullet, we are dealing with shades of gray, but marijuana laws are the biggie. They need to go, even if we cannot manage to tackle anything else.
Progress has already been made on the crack front, bringing penalties back down to the level as penalties for 'standard' cocaine (a drug with high-class associations). There is more work to be done, but we are getting there one baby-step at a time.
"There are 35 microphones planted around the city that can instantly detect the exact location of a gunshot down to a few meters (and just as instantly train cameras on escape routes)."
I'm glad it is. There are (much) bigger problems in the world than growth hacking and nginx performance.
There are many bright people here, it'd be a waste if important issues like these weren't discussed in this forum.
Hmm... what about Clojure?
When anyone can create an account and start voting, both moderation and reminders from existing users about appropriate content are needed to prevent or slow the move from specialized articles to general interest timewasters.
It happened to digg and reddit, I'm perfectly happy with people voicing concerns where appropriate to prevent HN from just becoming another reddit/digg/fark/somethingawful/thechive
There have long been articles dealing with sociological and economic realities of our time on HN.
I didn't realize how shitty NJ's resource distribution model was until I moved down to Baltimore and saw how differently Maryland invests in the state as a whole.
As for Baltimore, a) for eight years the governor was William Donald Schaeffer, a former mayor of Baltimore who thought of Maryland as a life-support system for Baltimore, b) not coincidentally, the cash cow of Maryland has for many years been Montgomery County, which is full of good-government types who seem to lack the technical political skills to make their influence felt.
I am still holding out hope that Cory Booker would become governor and make the necessary push for Newark, but I am not holding my breath for that. He may have higher ambitions.
>b) not coincidentally, the cash cow of Maryland has for many years been Montgomery County, which is full of good-government types who seem to lack the technical political skills to make their influence felt.
I suppose in that regard NJ is cursed because its source of tax revenue is from wall street types who are not exactly known for their egalitarianism :)
Complaining that NJ didn't force Hoboken to subsidize Newark is silly - San Fransisco and Toronto didn't subsidize Camden either, but I don't see you blaming them.
Complaining:
Pointing out problems isn't complaining.
Subsidize:
Investing and subsidizing aren't the same thing. When the arena was built in Newark I am sure some state help was involved, the end result has been an attraction that brings hockey fans to Newark who otherwise would have no reason to be there and patronize businesses.
I am not sure where SF and Toronto factor into what goes on in NJ.
Blaming:
You mean as opposed to the poor citizens taking responsibility and rebuilding the city?
You refuse to address the parent's arguments on their own terms, purposefully reading them in as obdurate a manner as possible, completely failing to engage them, and then blame the parent's "dismissive language". They are meaningful discussion.
It is now Camden County which encompasses a lot more than just the city.
Camden schools were taken over. http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/13/06/05/camden-schools-t...
Not sure what you're talking about.
But a big reason that Christie hit Camden's police unions so hard was simply that he could. He'd wanted to go after New Jersey urban schools...But a series of state Supreme Court rulings...
Then, this year, after two years of chaos, Christie and local leaders instituted a new reform, breaking the unions of the old municipal police force and reconstituting a new Metro police department under county control.
...
Predictably, the new Camden County-run police began to turn crime stats in the right direction with a combination of beefed-up numbers, significant investments in technology, and a cheaper and at least temporarily de-unionized membership.
...
In recent months, Christie has visited Camden several times, making it plain that he puts the daring 2011 gambit here in his political win column. And not everyone in Camden disagrees. One ex-con I talked to in the city surprised me by saying he liked what Christie had done, and compared Camden's decades-long consumption of state subsidies to the backward incentive system he'd seen in prison. "In prison, you can lie in your bed all day long and get credit for good time toward release," he said, shaking his head. "You should have to do something other than lie there."
For a guy like Taibbi, who can't describe union "excesses" without persistent scare quotes, this is praising with faint damnation.
I'd be curious as to how much of that $65,000,000 goes towards funding things like pensions and healthcare for retired workers. All of the new cops are starting without pensions in most municipalities (at least the ones that are low on money) and a huge part of their budget is paying for long-retired cops.
This really is devil's advocate, because I think pensions are outdated and shouldn't be offered to new workers. But part of the bargain with the civil service has been, basically, lifetime employment + retirement. There are costs to backing out on that.
There might not be a Safeway or a Kroger, but there are still places to buy groceries.
http://i.imgur.com/Ey903PW.png
Really tied of the media exaggerating the term 'food desert'
I'm not denying that the term "food desert" is suspect, I just can't tell what you're trying to prove.
The idea of a "food desert" as I understand it is that it's an area with limited access to nutritious foods. Most of Camden definitely qualifies, especially for residents without cars.
I assume the notorious Dunkin' Donuts store is still operating in Camden.
This article has been given the full "MATT TAIBBI" treatment. Of course he's a writer and wants to sell magazines.
He didn't add a "to be sure" phrase he is going for maximum gullibility of the readers to get emotion and engagement.
For example:
"where oblivious tourists pour in every year, gobbling cheese steaks and gazing at the Liberty Bell, having no idea that they're a short walk over the Ben Franklin Bridge from a full-blown sovereignty crisis – an un-Fantasy Island of extreme poverty and violence where the police just a few years ago essentially surrendered a city of 77,000."
So the definition of "oblivious" is "not aware of or not concerned about what is happening around one."
That would seem to imply to me that they have some kind of an obligation to be (when they are going on vacation) aware of what is happening across the river (and out of site) in a major city in the US. As if they are the CEO and aren't aware that there is sexual abuse going on and hey they should be. No such requirement exists. That they feel bad or should have some clue. Sorry not the case. Work hard, make money, take family on vacation. Saving the world do that on a different trip. Why not skip the trip and give the money you would spend to the poor people of Camden? Good for you.
Note also the triviality of "gobbling cheese steaks and gazing at the Liberty Bell" juxtaposed against true tragedy. Why does that matter? It doesn't but it provides color to the story and contrast. (By the way Philly is way more than cheesesteaks and the Liberty Bell I wish the media would get off of that already with the city).
Tourists of course are most likely aware that there is poverty somewhere in any big city. There is also plenty of poverty in North Philly but Taibbi doesn't focus on that (and that's just as close and in the same city).
By the way I wonder how many people going to Rock Concerts are "oblivious" to all the things that go on with respect to musicians, drugs and the drug trade? Or do they just want to hear good music? That's fine, right?
Thanks Taibbi for stoking people's fears needlessly
In such circumstances, those who can afford to leave - leave, and those who must stay make the choice to speak out against the situation and put themselves at terrible risk, or stay quiet, and witness the decline of the community.
With shrinking tax revenue from corporations cheating on their taxes and the rise of bitcoin sucking even more fiat currency away from taxes, I do not like this future.
Its a dying city because its population dropped about 0.3% per year. Like saying my blood pressure has dropped about 1 point due to some (minimal) exercise in the last month, therefore I'm dead. And then later on the population is now booming because of white heroin addicts moving into the city, but its also dying anyway at the same time or some foolishness.
The rust belt was news and new and insightful in 1970 or so. Unfortunately its almost the spring of 2014. That's all ancient history. Like reading breathless reporting of the activities of Martin Luther (not MLKjr, I mean the original ML). My grandpa thought stories about "rust belts" are "news", and I'm not that young anymore.
"Not long ago" means a century ago, in a nation with a 24 hour news cycle. Uh huh. Just a few moments ago I was driving my covered wagon to work and ... oh wait.
There is some insight in the "future is already here, just unevenly distributed" aspect of the story. Also its got some "true crime" voyeurism.
He's a good writer, usually better than this. If joe average journalist wrote this I wouldn't be as... offended. For my local fishwrap of a newspaper this would be an average tolerable article, which might be why its going out of business slowly, the point is he usually does much better than this.
It is funny to see articles like this on a site with so many hard core followers of urban living. For 99% of the population, Camden is "real urban living" not SV/SFO and NYC. So you can see the disbelief bordering on laughter WRT urban revival. Yeah I can't wait until I can live in Camden and walk to work LOL, sounds like paradise. And Camden is a thousand miles from here, but where I live you need a car and a suburban house and a (short) commute if you don't want to live in Camden-Lite. And that's what the real world is like.
I understand why you view this as "old news". From that point of view, it probably is a bit disappointing.
My take on the article, as someone who doesn't live in the US, was sadness that such things are still happening. That large groups of people can be effectively abandoned by civil society, that elected politicians connive to do this for their own gain, that so many lives are ruined by neglect and poverty. That this is still happneing is the whole point.
Ah I understand and thanks for the perspective. Locally its very well understood thanks to "if it bleeds, it leads" and infotainment in general. There's a checkbox that every single night there must be a report about violent crime in the inner city. Often a murder or shooting, but always something... Its extremely heavily propagandized.
Numerically you're far more likely to die in a car accident than get shot walking down alleys in the inner city at 2am, BUT, I checked the math and you are about 5000 times more likely to get shot in the inner city than where I live about 20 miles away. No kidding, about 5000 times.
The other part which probably isn't understood outside the country is even in the north, we segregate extremely heavily. Its extremely unusual other than maybe student dorms to ever see a mixed ethnicity neighborhood. Note I'm making a correct factual observation not a value judgment. The value judgement comes up when you can take a wild guess about what the TV news editors decide to report about neighborhoods of certain ethnic groups. As you can probably guess the "national sacrifice zones" are absolutely not populated by members of the dominate ethnic group, if you know what I mean, and the people in charge pretty much like it that way (again, an observation of their behavior, NOT an agreement with their behavior)
As someone living in a city gutted by de-industrialization and the drug trade (Wilmington, DE), I think it's news that 40 years later, these places are still in poor shape. The usual response to concerns about technology or globalization putting people out of work is that it just frees them up to work on something better and more useful. "New jobs will replace those that are lost." Well, the people here are still waiting for those new jobs to replace the ones that got automated or outsourced away.
> And Camden is a thousand miles from here, but where I live you need a car and a suburban house and a (short) commute if you don't want to live in Camden-Lite.
I think this is quite exaggerated. Aside from Detroit and New Orleans, cities in the Delaware Valley like Camden and Wilmington have some of the worst crime in the country, because they face the challenges of other Rust-belt cities and are also on the major drug trade route up I-95.
Fully a quarter of the U.S. population lives in the metro areas of just six cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, San Jose/San Francisco, and Boston. These cities are all quite safe, and the idea that people might either move into the core cities or to satellite cities in those areas is hardly ridiculous. And there's a long list of cities that are perfectly safe that aren't one of those six: San Diego, Austin, Seattle, Portland, Charlotte, etc. And there are even more cities that are perfectly safe in the areas middle class people would actually live. I lived for seven years in Atlanta, and it was very safe as long as you lived on the north side.
Chicago and Los Angeles are safe if you live in a upper-middle class white neighborhood. Chicago is the most dangerous large city in the US.
Second, it is not true that Chicago is only safe if you live in rich white enclaves. What is instead true is that two large tracts on the south and west sides of the city (Englewood and Lawndale, respectively) are currently lost to gang violence. But Chicago also has huge swaths of lower-middle-class neighborhoods that are no more dangerous than those of any other big city. A huge portion of those neighborhoods are hispanic, and there are many majority-African American neighborhoods with low crime stats as well.
It is possible that your friends who live in Chicago don't realize this, because what is also true about Chicago is that the 20-something hipster demographic lives almost exclusively in just a few neighborhoods on the north and near northwest sides.
For example, and I speak from experience, there are no middle class people left anymore in the city of Milwaukee. School district stats show 90%+ poverty rates in the public schools, and a couple $25K/yr private schools for the wealthy leaders, and almost nobody in between, until you commute at least 5 to 10 miles away.
Re: school statistics. Chicago also has 90% low-income in the school district, but there are tons of middle class people in the city. A lot of the gap is filled by parochial schools. For example, Chicago has ~400,000 school aged kids enrolled in CPS, 87% of which are low-income. But it has ~615,000 school-aged kids. There are 30,000 kids enrolled in Catholic schools alone.
MPS has an 81% student poverty rate, not 90+%[0]. Good students in MPS can access the magnet schools, where, to use my sister as an example, one can complete sufficient IB classes to get a BS and MS within 4 years, leading up to a PhD from MIT. Marquette University HS, the high-end Jesuit school, has tuition of $11,000. And the cost of private school is reflected in the lower home prices and property taxes in the city of Milwaukee.
Milwaukee isn't a shining city on a hill, but there's plenty of good living to be had there, and at a very low price compared to many cities. It has more than its share of problems due to un- and underemployment since its industrial fall, but it's nothing like Camden.
[0]http://www.milwaukeenns.org/2013/08/09/poverty-crime-contrib...
Parts of each are safer than parts of both and so on, and the comparison of the consolidated units probably doesn't tell us much.
Edit: A different way of putting it would be to say that Wayne County is a better thing to compare to Chicago.
Yet some places hit by these trends (Boston and Seattle come to mind) were reinvented, and others didn't; the question of why some did and others didn't is a fascinating one, and I've seen many of the arguments from urban / geographical economists like Edward Glaeser and Richard Florida.
My GF and I were actually thinking about moving to Wilmington for a job, and we can't figure out why it isn't semi-desirable even for its proximity by train to NYC and DC. There are now some new mid-rises near the train stations, but those are weirdly expensive (we got quotes of close to $2K for one bedrooms; for that kind of money, where's the competition with Brooklyn or downtown Seattle?)
The separation of the U of Delaware from Wilmington by 15 or so miles is certainly unfortunate and may help explain why Boston (innumerable universities) and Seattle (University of Washington, Seattle University) succeeded while Wilmington did not. It also started from a MUCH smaller base; the 2010 Census says that Wilmington is 70K, which is TINY and probably too small to achieve clustering effects in most industries.
If I were a civic booster type in Wilmington, I'd probably try to focus on proximity by train to DC, but the university problem means that I think the city is a lost cause.
One of the reasons (in addition to what you have mentioned) is that the areas that were closest to the south and had good welfare and benefits attracted many poor people looking to escape poverty tended to go to the places that were closer to the south. Boston is farther than NYC, Philly, Delaware etc.
Not for the people who are still living there, it isn't.
This type of thinking is part of the problem we have in America -- "eh, too bad that your town got eaten alive, sucks to be you I guess." But the blight doesn't stop, it just keeps spreading. It's not hard to imagine a near future where the United States is a few islands of fantastic, unbelievable wealth -- NYC, the Bay Area, DC -- in a vast sea of potholed highways, shuttered businesses and backyard meth labs.
I guess if you think you'll be fortunate enough to be one of the few people living on those islands, you don't care. But life has no guarantees, and as wealth concentrates more and more people will find themselves effectively voted off the island they thought would save them.
Is it really that bad?
1) Can cities outlive their usefulness? My answer = yes. 2) If yes, what should happen when they do? My answer = most try to hang on or re-invent themselves, but restructuring sooner rather than later might be best.