10 ms·

Camden, New Jersey: America's Most Desperate Town

89 points by georgecmu 13y ago

VLM 13y ago
A disappointing effort by Taibbi, usually does a lot better. Way too much exaggeration. 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.
- JackFr 13y ago
  I agree in the assessment of disappointing, because I think there could be a good story here. I think it's hurt not only by the exaggeration and breathlessness, but also Taibbi's need to force everything into his chosen political narrative with mixed results. Subtlety is lost on him and he seems incapable pursuasive writing -- guiding the reader to reach conclusions rather than explicitly setting them out.
- andyjohnson0 13y ago
  "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." 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.
  - VLM 13y ago
    "as someone who doesn't live in the US" 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)
- rayiner 13y ago
  > The rust belt was news and new and insightful in 1970 or so 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.
  - bluedino 13y ago
    >> 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. 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.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - tptacek 13y ago
      First, no, Chicago is not the most dangerous city in the US. Per capita, it's not even in the top ten. People have a bad habit of looking at Chicago's totals while forgetting that the city is gigantic. The logic that says Chicago is the most dangerous city in the US also says that Camden is safer than Dallas. 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.
- smacktoward 13y ago
  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. 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.
bluedino 13y ago
>> In September, its last supermarket closed, and the city has been declared a "food desert" by the USDA. There might not be a Safeway or a Kroger, but there are still places to buy groceries. http://i.imgur.com/Ey903PW.png http://i.imgur.com/Ey903PW.png Really tied of the media exaggerating the term 'food desert'
- xionon 13y ago
  What are these buildings? Are they discount grocers, with cheap but OK food, or are they gas stations, with lunchables and frozen pizzas? It's hard to tell from a screenshot of a map. I'm not denying that the term "food desert" is suspect, I just can't tell what you're trying to prove.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    They're Food-and-Liquors. You can buy milk and eggs there.
  - gphil 13y ago
    Based on street view (and my limited knowledge of Camden based on living across the Delaware River in Philadelphia) these are all corner stores and bodegas that in some cases may have some limited fresh food, but most of the sales volume is likely packaged goods. 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.
- SyneRyder 13y ago
  There's also plenty of places to buy food in Philly. You can walk there across the bridge, but it's something like a 30 minute walk each way (so not ideal for a proper grocery trip). There's also buses to/from Philly, unless that's changed since mid-2011. I assume the notorious Dunkin' Donuts store is still operating in Camden.
  - Crito 13y ago
    Philly is not exactly packed with grocery stores either. Without a car getting across the bridge is the easy part, you then need to get to one of the grocery stores and get back from it with your food. That will take a while, even on buses (which are rather poor in Philly), so in order to make it worth your time you will need to get a lot of food at once... which is difficult without a car, even on buses.
SyneRyder 13y ago
For folks wondering why this is on HN, there's some interesting info in the middle of the article about the tech the new police force are using in Camden: "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)."
- colechristensen 13y ago
  Check out these maps of shots fired in Minneapolis: http://www.minneapolismn.gov/police/statistics/crime-statistics_codefor_shotsfired http://www.minneapolismn.gov/police/statistics/crime-statist...
- brk 13y ago
  Yeah, that's more hype than reality. Those gunshot detectors work 'ok' not perfect. And they don't have enough detectors or cameras for anything other than the most basic coverage.
- jmngomes 13y ago
  "For folks wondering why this is on HN" 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.
  - Kynlyn 13y ago
    And there are countless forums to discuss such "important" issues. Just because a story has humanistic touch, that doesn't mean it belongs here.
    - _of 13y ago
      You don't need to read it if you are not interested. I'm a tech guy and I found it very interesting to read.
  - elwell 13y ago
JackFr 13y ago
According to Taibbi, the only person in the state of New Jersey with any moral responsibility for his or her actions is the governor. The city of Camden is populated entirely by victims, and the cause of their misery is Chris Christie.
- Edmond 13y ago
  I believe Camden is more or less under state control so it is right to blame the state. NJ has an awful track record when it comes to how it treats its urban areas. Newark, which would be considered a crown jewel anywhere else has been left to rot for 40yrs. The state is very unequal in terms of investment to various areas, basically you can quickly tell where the high income earners live and where the rest live wherever you go in NJ. 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.
  - cafard 13y ago
    New Jersey has very fragmented local government. In Maryland, the school districts (for example) are by county. 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.
    - Edmond 13y ago
      The fragmented government is definitely a major issue, I believe there was an attempt to consolidate municipalities sometime back, not sure how well that went. In some places it seems every few blocks is a new municipality. 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 :)
CompleteMoron2 13y ago
lets set up a startup there!!!
JimWillTri 13y ago
Camden was a shithole even in the early '70s. My great grandmother was robbed, beaten, tied up and left for dead on the floor of her tenement looking apartment. She was found alive a few days later.
- RankingMember 13y ago
  Woah. I'm not questioning the authenticity of your story, but do you have a news article about that? That's a crazy thing to have happen to you anywhere and I'd be curious where exactly in Camden it occurred.
  - larrys 13y ago
    Can't verify the parent story but can verify that Camden was a stinkhole in the early 70's.
  - JimWillTri 13y ago
    This was the 70s so of course you can't exactly link a story. This wouldn't have been that big of a story back then - too much crime going on at once.
nakedrobot2 13y ago
"a graphic preview of what might lie ahead for communities that don't generate enough of their own tax revenue to keep their lights on. " 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.
bluedino 13y ago
>> The police force alone in Camden costs more than $65 million a year. 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.
- trailcable 13y ago
  There is no police force in city of Camden anymore. It is a county wide police force for Camden County.
- invalidOrTaken 13y ago
  I'd like to play devil's advocate for a bit: are we ignoring the value of credibility with cops? Cut off benefits previously promised, and you find potential workers no longer trust you. 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.
dmschulman 13y ago
I believe the term is "poverty porn": http://www.phillymag.com/news/2013/12/12/rolling-stone-camden-article-poverty-porn-rutgers-professor/ http://www.phillymag.com/news/2013/12/12/rolling-stone-camde... Thanks Taibbi for stoking people's fears needlessly
blisterpeanuts 13y ago
If I were the king, I would fix Camden (and dozens of other grim urban districts around the country such as Detroit, north St. Louis, etc.) with the following plan: 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?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - auctiontheory 13y ago
    IF you get good teachers, etc. to live in your technocratic war zone, their high salaries jack up the cost of living I've never heard of the cost of living anywhere going up because of an influx of highly-paid K-12 teachers.
    - 13y ago
squozzer 13y ago
I think Camden and other cities in similar situations can provide us with learning -- 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.
geoka9 13y ago
> Elsewhere, struggling white rural America is stocking up on canned goods and embracing the politics of chaos, sending pols to Washington ready to hit the default button and start the whole national experiment all over again. Is it really that bad?
djs123sdj 13y ago
The greatest tragedy of places like this is that the law abiding population is held hostage by the threat (and exercise) of violence by the dangerous members of their own community - who are relatively fewer in number. 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.

89 points by georgecmu 13y ago

VLM 13y ago

A disappointing effort by Taibbi, usually does a lot better. Way too much exaggeration. 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.

JackFr 13y ago
I agree in the assessment of disappointing, because I think there could be a good story here. I think it's hurt not only by the exaggeration and breathlessness, but also Taibbi's need to force everything into his chosen political narrative with mixed results. Subtlety is lost on him and he seems incapable pursuasive writing -- guiding the reader to reach conclusions rather than explicitly setting them out.
andyjohnson0 13y ago
"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." 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.
- VLM 13y ago
  "as someone who doesn't live in the US" 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)
rayiner 13y ago
> The rust belt was news and new and insightful in 1970 or so 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.
- bluedino 13y ago
  >> 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. 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.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - tptacek 13y ago
    First, no, Chicago is not the most dangerous city in the US. Per capita, it's not even in the top ten. People have a bad habit of looking at Chicago's totals while forgetting that the city is gigantic. The logic that says Chicago is the most dangerous city in the US also says that Camden is safer than Dallas. 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.
smacktoward 13y ago
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. 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.

bluedino 13y ago

>> In September, its last supermarket closed, and the city has been declared a "food desert" by the USDA. There might not be a Safeway or a Kroger, but there are still places to buy groceries. http://i.imgur.com/Ey903PW.png http://i.imgur.com/Ey903PW.png Really tied of the media exaggerating the term 'food desert'

xionon 13y ago
What are these buildings? Are they discount grocers, with cheap but OK food, or are they gas stations, with lunchables and frozen pizzas? It's hard to tell from a screenshot of a map. I'm not denying that the term "food desert" is suspect, I just can't tell what you're trying to prove.
- tptacek 13y ago
  They're Food-and-Liquors. You can buy milk and eggs there.
- gphil 13y ago
  Based on street view (and my limited knowledge of Camden based on living across the Delaware River in Philadelphia) these are all corner stores and bodegas that in some cases may have some limited fresh food, but most of the sales volume is likely packaged goods. 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.
SyneRyder 13y ago
There's also plenty of places to buy food in Philly. You can walk there across the bridge, but it's something like a 30 minute walk each way (so not ideal for a proper grocery trip). There's also buses to/from Philly, unless that's changed since mid-2011. I assume the notorious Dunkin' Donuts store is still operating in Camden.
- Crito 13y ago
  Philly is not exactly packed with grocery stores either. Without a car getting across the bridge is the easy part, you then need to get to one of the grocery stores and get back from it with your food. That will take a while, even on buses (which are rather poor in Philly), so in order to make it worth your time you will need to get a lot of food at once... which is difficult without a car, even on buses.

SyneRyder 13y ago

For folks wondering why this is on HN, there's some interesting info in the middle of the article about the tech the new police force are using in Camden: "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)."

colechristensen 13y ago
Check out these maps of shots fired in Minneapolis: http://www.minneapolismn.gov/police/statistics/crime-statistics_codefor_shotsfired http://www.minneapolismn.gov/police/statistics/crime-statist...
brk 13y ago
Yeah, that's more hype than reality. Those gunshot detectors work 'ok' not perfect. And they don't have enough detectors or cameras for anything other than the most basic coverage.
jmngomes 13y ago
"For folks wondering why this is on HN" 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.
- Kynlyn 13y ago
  And there are countless forums to discuss such "important" issues. Just because a story has humanistic touch, that doesn't mean it belongs here.
  - _of 13y ago
    You don't need to read it if you are not interested. I'm a tech guy and I found it very interesting to read.
- elwell 13y ago

JackFr 13y ago

According to Taibbi, the only person in the state of New Jersey with any moral responsibility for his or her actions is the governor. The city of Camden is populated entirely by victims, and the cause of their misery is Chris Christie.

Edmond 13y ago
I believe Camden is more or less under state control so it is right to blame the state. NJ has an awful track record when it comes to how it treats its urban areas. Newark, which would be considered a crown jewel anywhere else has been left to rot for 40yrs. The state is very unequal in terms of investment to various areas, basically you can quickly tell where the high income earners live and where the rest live wherever you go in NJ. 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.
- cafard 13y ago
  New Jersey has very fragmented local government. In Maryland, the school districts (for example) are by county. 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.
  - Edmond 13y ago
    The fragmented government is definitely a major issue, I believe there was an attempt to consolidate municipalities sometime back, not sure how well that went. In some places it seems every few blocks is a new municipality. 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 :)

CompleteMoron2 13y ago

lets set up a startup there!!!

JimWillTri 13y ago

Camden was a shithole even in the early '70s. My great grandmother was robbed, beaten, tied up and left for dead on the floor of her tenement looking apartment. She was found alive a few days later.

RankingMember 13y ago
Woah. I'm not questioning the authenticity of your story, but do you have a news article about that? That's a crazy thing to have happen to you anywhere and I'd be curious where exactly in Camden it occurred.
- larrys 13y ago
  Can't verify the parent story but can verify that Camden was a stinkhole in the early 70's.
- JimWillTri 13y ago
  This was the 70s so of course you can't exactly link a story. This wouldn't have been that big of a story back then - too much crime going on at once.

nakedrobot2 13y ago

"a graphic preview of what might lie ahead for communities that don't generate enough of their own tax revenue to keep their lights on. " 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.

bluedino 13y ago

>> The police force alone in Camden costs more than $65 million a year. 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.

trailcable 13y ago
There is no police force in city of Camden anymore. It is a county wide police force for Camden County.
invalidOrTaken 13y ago
I'd like to play devil's advocate for a bit: are we ignoring the value of credibility with cops? Cut off benefits previously promised, and you find potential workers no longer trust you. 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.

dmschulman 13y ago

I believe the term is "poverty porn": http://www.phillymag.com/news/2013/12/12/rolling-stone-camden-article-poverty-porn-rutgers-professor/ http://www.phillymag.com/news/2013/12/12/rolling-stone-camde... Thanks Taibbi for stoking people's fears needlessly

blisterpeanuts 13y ago

If I were the king, I would fix Camden (and dozens of other grim urban districts around the country such as Detroit, north St. Louis, etc.) with the following plan: 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?

deleted 13y ago
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- auctiontheory 13y ago
  IF you get good teachers, etc. to live in your technocratic war zone, their high salaries jack up the cost of living I've never heard of the cost of living anywhere going up because of an influx of highly-paid K-12 teachers.
  - 13y ago

squozzer 13y ago

I think Camden and other cities in similar situations can provide us with learning -- 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.

geoka9 13y ago

> Elsewhere, struggling white rural America is stocking up on canned goods and embracing the politics of chaos, sending pols to Washington ready to hit the default button and start the whole national experiment all over again. Is it really that bad?

djs123sdj 13y ago

The greatest tragedy of places like this is that the law abiding population is held hostage by the threat (and exercise) of violence by the dangerous members of their own community - who are relatively fewer in number. 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.