Collapse of a City
Lazare, Daniel
Growth and Decay of Camden, New Jersey homas Roberts, Camden, New Jersey's affable director of economic redevelopment, used to be optimistic about bringing his moribund waterfront city back to...
...If Camden had been like Brooklyn, part of a larger river-straddling metropolis, its fortunes might have turned out differently...
...A graduate of Rutgers Law School in Camden and a former congressman from Camden County, Florio ran for governor in 1989 assuring voters that he foresaw no immediate need to raise taxes...
...The city has an excellent rapid transit link to downtown Philadelphia...
...Four highways cross the Delaware between Philadelphia and New Jersey, but only one touches Camden, nicking its southern corner...
...To which anyone surveying the chaos of an East St...
...The thirties put a temporary halt to deurbanization in Camden by imposing a brake on suburban development, whereas the forties saw something of a reversal as driving was curtailed due to gasoline rationing and workers poured into Camden's shipyards to meet the demands of wartime production...
...Yet the decay had barely begun...
...In Newark, frozen at just 24 square miles, the middle-class exodus was alarming...
...The enemy was not capitalism, it seemed, merely the inequitable distribution of capitalism's fruits...
...The Florio administration also required local districts to begin paying the costs of teacher pensions, adding significantly to the local school burden...
...In 1961 the country's largest indoor shopping mall opened in Cherry Hill, robbing Camden of its role as a regional retail center...
...It was a recipe for a political explosion, as Jim Florio has since discovered...
...It goes by like a blur...
...Immigrants and blacks poured into the city as middle-class residents poured out...
...In addition to dividing the city in half and removing hundreds of yards of taxable real estate, the chief effect has been to provide Camden's vestigial business community with an even quicker means of escape...
...Florio astonished friend and foe by slashing expenditures and raising sales and income taxes not only to balance the budget but also to generate an additional $1 billion for urban school aid...
...Then there was what might be called the rat-hole problem: the reluctance of middle-class homeowners to pour hundreds of millions of dollars down the drain of supposedly hopeless urban school districts...
...Pundits and politicians wasted much ink trying to figure out why, yet historically the answer is rather simple...
...The city has the highest property tax rate in the state, as well as one of the highest tax delinquency rates...
...Questioning whether communities composed of uneducated poor people are capable of running well-funded, up-to-date school systems may reek of racism and elitism, yet only the most starry-eyed advocate of small-scale democracy would offer unqualified assurances that they could...
...In the United States, many of them are economic wastelands that buyers, sellers, and workers avoid...
...In most of the rest of the world, they remain a basic unit of production, places where people go to buy, to work, and to sell...
...In contrast to the days when Camden's Broadway bustled with life, visitors to the Disneyfied version a few miles to the southeast are sparse...
...But Camden and its suburbs might as well be on different planets...
...This was not merely a child-centered environment...
...Obviously, a proposal to double or triple gas prices is not "practical" under present circumstances...
...At $65 per tankful of gas, roughly what French motorists have been paying following the invasion of Kuwait, land-use patterns would alter as thoroughly as they did during suburbanization...
...All they know is that cities like Camden have sucked up more and more state money in recent years, yet have continued to careen downhill...
...In the newly suburbanized township of Voorhees, they are building a $350 million "mixed-use development" consisting of condos, offices, shops, and restaurants...
...It won't be long before the street is in darkness," a local realtor said of Broadway, the city's main shopping strip...
...Cities, they presume, no more decline because their citizens have grown poor and degraded than factories fail because their workers have grown unaccountably lazy and unproductive...
...Intense traffic congestion, no small factor in the decline of urban America, left the city noisier than ever, while widening roads and installing off-street parking merely removed valuable real estate from the tax rolls...
...Urban industrialism was the norm, it was assumed, as was urban concentration...
...Americans were also conscious of inequality, to be sure, although usually from a populist perspective...
...Until the great burst of post—World War II prosperity, cars in Western Europe were seen as conveyances for the rich, whereas trams, trains, and bicycles were for proletarians...
...It's a town for the nineties," adds John Maguire, the general manager, "where people can take some of the elements of the city and some of the suburbs and try to get the best of both, to try to walk places instead of driving everywhere...
...They wanted the state to take care of traffic, garbage-disposal, and the property-tax crises, yet demanded to be left alone in their suburban fortresses to spend their municipal tax dollars as they saw fit...
...They were dirty, crowded, and, most of all, uncontrolled...
...Homeowners in the depressed Northeast were caught between the hammer of falling real estate values and the anvil of rising taxes...
...it is actually insolvent...
...It has two prisons, a thriving prostitution and drug trade, and a murder rate well above New York's...
...It reveals the intolerance of the suburban system for alternative forms of human organization...
...It undermines whatever cost advantages a city might pose...
...Not long after, the state embarked on construction of a $42 million state-of-the-art waterfront aquarium that would supposedly help pump tourist money into the city...
...Camden, perhaps the poorest city in the Northeast, is an unusually grim example...
...yet due to the oversupply of highway transport, it is sparsely used...
...The new order resulted in a new distribution of population: while Camden's leveled off during the twenties, the rest of the county's doubled...
...One factor was motorization...
...With the rise of a civil rights movement capable of dealing heroically with Jim Crow laws in the South but unequipped to respond to the urban economic implosion in the North, racial discord rose and white flight turned into a panicky rout...
...City air makes one free," the saying went in the Middle Ages...
...Whereas the sales tax increase went into effect immediately, property tax relief to less well-off communities did not kick in until several months later...
...For Marxists, the opposite is more likely to be true...
...By 1929, the number was down to 36 percent...
...Campbell's, still in its presoup days, opened an agricultural processing plant in the city in the 1860s...
...has become the semi-official state joke, just as Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run," a lurid tale of motorcycle madness and highway alienation, has become the semi-official state song...
...Those who fall into them (or, due to racial and economic factors, have been pushed) are cut off from jobs, robbed of dignity, battered by crime, and forced to rely on welfare, drug dealing, or prostitution...
...Yet as the era of the common man accelerated, social atomization worsened...
...The Florio administration has vowed to step up monitoring to ensure that its money is well spent, but suburbanites are skeptical...
...for the cities, a new type of economic warfare...
...It is "an asylum for the preservation of illusion," a refuge where people can eat, drink, and be merry without having to produce, take political responsibility, or give a thought to the economic world outside...
...With demobilization, the miniboom burst...
...If motorists were required to pick up even a portion of these costs, it would do far more for cities like Newark, Trenton, and Camden than a broad-based sales tax...
...In the post—World War I period, the middle class found itself with the technology and political power to remake the world much as it wanted it to be, a world based on private cars, private homes, leafy tree-lined streets, and small businesses...
...I hope I never see a trolley again," one realtor exclaimed after a streetcar strike in 1923, and over the next dozen years, Camden's trolley lines, backbone of its transport system, would be dismantled...
...Louis or Detroit might reply with another medieval slogan: "All hope abandon, ye who enter here...
...Death by Suburbanization It's not that cities are obsolete, but that something about America has caused them to collapse...
...It has no supermarkets, no movie theaters, and a tiny downtown shopping district that makes Harlem's 125th Street seem lavish...
...Senator Bill Bradley, who had made his name as a champion of neoliberal federal tax reform, did his best to dodge the explosive question of tax rationalization at the local level and, for his efforts, was nearly toppled by an obscure Republican freeholder named Christine Todd Whitman...
...Flint still has its local gentry, judging from Moore's film, its blue-rinsed ladies complaining about lazy, laid-off auto workers, while Camden's gentry departed long ago...
...In 1940, a proposal to consolidate Newark and its neighboring communities into a single, more efficient municipal unit ran into fierce resistance in the suburbs...
...While Camden has been effectively bottled up, the factors that caused its demise have gone on to wreak havoc with the rest of the state...
...Even if nervous suburbanites can be persuaded to drop by for a visit, plans call for it to be served by yet another of Camden's parking lots, meaning that visitors will most likely bundle the kids back into the car as soon as they're finished, without sticking around to sample Camden's other delights...
...So what should the state do instead...
...Battle lines hardened as suburbanites sought to bottle up the cities with their immigrants, racial minorities, political strife and unsettling new ideologies, and heavy industry...
...The New York Shipbuilding Co...
...Barring some miracle of gentrification, Camden will remain a relic of an industrial past...
...Factory smoke during this period also blanketed the waterfronts of Brooklyn, St...
...Mainstream urbanologists, steeped in an ideology of liberal individualism, usually begin with the assumption that the urban crisis is an extension of the crisis of the underclass, that personal and cultural dysfunction breeds economic failure...
...The ultimate solution," declared Henry Ford in 1922, "will be the abandonment of the city, its abandonment as a blunder...
...A great outward expansion took place as motorists spread out over the countryside, cutting themselves loose from rail lines and streetcars...
...Once in office, however, he (1) remembered that his Republican predecessor, Tom Kean, had left a $900-million budget deficit and (2) that a 1989 state Supreme Court ruling required the state to equalize spending between its wealthiest school districts and its poorest...
...Other engineers and economists, citing such factors as the market value of urban real estate devoted to roads, highways, and legally mandated parking, the rising cost of highway construction, and the structural damage wrought to surrounding buildings by heavy traffic, peg the total deficit at $4 to $6 per gallon and up for cars and considerably more for heavy trucks...
...By the 1820s, it was a loosely bound collection of a half dozen villages located about half a mile apart from one another, the largest consisting of more than 360 homes and other structures...
...Cities per se are not outmoded...
...Others are marked by payoffs and political favoritism, racial conflicts, and the sort of porous accounting that allows millions of dollars to vanish into thin air...
...Here individuality could prosper, oblivious of the pervasive regimentation beyond...
...Hot that the tax protesters were without a few arguments...
...This is a requirement that drives up costs, rent, and prices while squandering huge portions of prime South Jersey farmland...
...Jersey City found itself hemmed in with less than 15 square miles, while Paterson, site of the great silk strikes of the 1910s and twenties, was limited to just 8.5...
...In keeping with the scorched-earth urban renewal policy of the day, older buildings were razed to make way for new ones that never seemed to get built...
...Local democracy cannot flourish, obviously, without effective leadership at the top, and local communities should not be given carte blanche to strangle their neighbors without at least some broader debate as to the consequences...
...Here domesticity could flourish, forgetful of the exploitation on which so much of it was based...
...Following criticism by the Navy for shoddy workmanship, a breakdown in labor-management relations, and poor corporate leadership, the New York Shipbuilding Co., Camden's largest employer, closed in the early sixties, eliminating thousands of jobs...
...Cities that once seemed powerful suddenly seemed small and constraining...
...During a visit in late August, a reporter found most of the stores advertising sales, a sure sign of retail malaise...
...Louis, a city these days that is more than bankrupt...
...Yet Florio was ultimately forced to retreat in the face of unprecedented public outrage...
...It has no poor people, few nonwhites, and no factories where things are made, as opposed to sold or consumed...
...Rather, as a former rail and ferry hub strategically located across from Philadelphia, it would once again find itself at the center of action...
...Near-total reliance on property taxes for municipal expenditures means that every city, township, and borough must engage in an all-against-all struggle for a profitable mix of tax assets, resulting in a depressingly uniform pattern of malls, stripzoned shopping centers, and suburban tract housing overspreading the countryside...
...Setting aside more space for cars than people lowers human intimacy and assures that habitations and workplaces will be overshadowed by parking lots and garages...
...It's a city to drive through...
...Because development breeds traffic, builders spent the boom years of the eighties ranging farther and farther afield in search of as-yet-uncongested markets...
...Some towns—middle-class suburban ones, mostly— are progressive, efficient, and squeaky clean, the kind of places where earnest young parents spend hours discussing reading programs and math instruction...
...Louis, Buffalo, and so on...
...Yet Main Street at Voorhees seems to work as 274 • DISSENT Collages of a City neither a city nor a suburb...
...Beginning in the late seventies, office parks and shopping malls in search of a swanky mailing address began springing up along Route 1 outside of Princeton Borough...
...The answer to auto-fueled de-urbanization, consequently, was not stiff gas taxes to fund mass transit, but cheap gas, cheap roads, and hence more cars...
...Suburban homeowners in New Jersey were outraged as a class...
...Today, Camden is a city without a raison d'etre...
...This provided jobs, but did nothing to pay property taxes, nearly the sole form of municipal income in New Jersey, 270 • DISSENT Collapse of a City and in fact removed significant chunks of real estate from the tax rolls...
...You live in New Jersey...
...With the arrival of steam power in the 1830s, Camden expanded into a rail, shipping, and industrial center...
...The high crime rate will continue to scare off investors...
...Equally important were political changes unfolding around this time...
...A socialist re-urbanization program would also dismantle the system of public subsidies for private consumption that is the core of the suburban system, particularly tax subsidies for home ownership, which disproportionately favor upper-bracket taxpayers with the largest homes, and the myriad subsidies for the private automobile...
...Suburban municipal autonomy will remain essentially intact...
...Kids who study hard and learn marketable skills will most likely move out of the city...
...The assumption across the political spectrum was that it would go on blanketing the waterfront...
...City officials are quick to cite the abundance of cheap, downtown parking...
...Yet this assumption was wrong...
...In 1916, 54 percent of the officers and directors of the city's chamber of commerce lived in Newark proper...
...But what they don't mention is that Camden has so much flat space because roughly two out of three buildings have been leveled in what was once a bustling business district...
...Pouring in hundreds of millions more, they contend, is not likely to cause them to change...
...Residents of one neighborhood who didn't like paying for streetlights in another no longer had to engage in the tedious rituals of municipal democracy...
...Within ten years, the local newspaper, the Courier-Post, had deserted Camden for suburban Cherry Hill, while the downtown shopping district grew frighteningly seedy...
...Ironically, several leaders of the revolt came from precisely the sort of lower-middle-class communities the Florio tax plan was designed to benefit...
...later RCA-Victor) to make records, while by 1920 industrial activity had reached such intensity along the Camden and Philadelphia waterfronts that a ferry traveler could observe that "[s]moke from hundreds of factories along the river on both sides fell like a blanket to the surface of the stream, enveloping all moving craft in a complete shroud of mist...
...Motorists would drive more frugally, and markets would open up for less costly forms of transport, such as trolleys, ferries, trains, and bikes...
...Louis-East St...
...Everything in Main Street is neat and clean, with no shadows, no social conflict, and no more history than one would find in any other shopping mall...
...The pedestrian-oriented downtown business district would become competitive with shopping malls accessible only by car...
...The consequences were dramatic...
...Where Flint has been reeling under a wave of Japanese auto imports since the 1970s, Camden has been on the skids since its shipyards went into decline in the forties...
...Home rule, the doctrine by which New Jersey's 567 municipalities are allowed to sink or swim, means that regional planning is nil...
...Sixty-four municipalities sprang into existence in New Jersey in the 1920s, including a couple of country clubs 268 • DISSENT Collapse of a City outside Camden whose members, in the ultimate absurdity, voted to incorporate to get around local blue laws prohibiting Sunday golfing...
...Even then, residents suspected, not without reason, that whatever savings they might realize would be more than offset by rising tax rates brought on by the recession...
...What exit...
...Yet for the majority of Camdenites, who do not own cars, it is a city without exit...
...In the United States, cars were so abundant that even landless peasants rode around in them (as Soviet citizens discovered to their astonishment when the movie version of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath made its way to the USSR...
...Clearly, Florio's campaign promises were disingenuous, although supporters defended them on the quasi-Jesuitical grounds that they were a sin in the service of a higher morality—to put a stop to a grossly inequitable system that taxed urbanites to the hilt while permitting suburbanites to pay less for a better public education...
...Thus the suburb served as an asylum for the preservation of illusion...
...As of 1985, per capita income stood at $5,700$800 less than Newark, $1,500 less than the hard-hit former silk-weaving center of Paterson, and barely a third of what suburbanites make in neighboring Cherry Hill...
...Throughout New Jersey, a state that has long defined itself through hostility to the urban giants of New York and Philadelphia, the anti-urban tide seemed irresistible...
...Yet within a dozen years construction in what was SPRING • 1991 • 271 Collapse of a City once one of the hottest real-estate corridors in the country was at a standstill...
...While rural preachers thundered against speakeasies and subversion and the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses in the New Jersey countryside, cities became fixed in the popular imagination as centers of sin and subversion, Jews and blacks...
...Evictions for nonpayment of rent form a running theme in Roger & Me...
...Sometimes I think if there weren't the government offices, the town just wouldn't be here any more," says Mary Alison Albright, an assistant county prosecutor who works in downtown Camden but lives in one of the outlying suburbs...
...The school aid program will not bring back the ferries and railroads that once were Camden's lifeblood...
...It is tied to the outside world not by train, trolley, or waterway, only by car...
...Injecting more than $100 million dollars a year in urban school aid, as the plan would do in Camden, will no doubt help raise educational opportunities for the urban poor...
...How did Camden fall so low...
...Camden does have one asset, though— parking...
...Something's got to give...
...New Jersey officials responded with halfmeasures that did nothing to restore Camden to health and everything to increase its dependence on the state...
...tax credits to fund private homes...
...For the suburbs, the new order was a form of liberation...
...Anything else was subversive to the holy order...
...The governor's role in such an arrangement was much like a feudal monarch's, that is, to safeguard the system and interpret the law, in this case the ancient (since 1917, that is) doctrine of home rule...
...Because the lesser nobility (or lower-middle-class homeowners) had more proportionally invested in the system, they were the ones who felt most threatened by rumors of its demise...
...First settled in 1688, it grew modestly but steadily through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a ferry and handicraft center, an agricultural hub for rural South Jersey...
...From 1981-87, the number of cars, trucks, and buses in New Jersey rose by 40 percent, triple the national rate, while the state road system expanded by less than 2 percent...
...Growth and Decay of Camden, New Jersey homas Roberts, Camden, New Jersey's affable director of economic redevelopment, used to be optimistic about bringing his moribund waterfront city back to life...
...In other words, it's a place where middle-class shoppers can pick and choose, fashioning reality along lines outlined by the consumer culture...
...SPRING • 1991 • 275...
...While in keeping with movements around the country to check the expansion of big cities, New Jersey's went considerably further by granting nearly unlimited powers to secede...
...Camden will still have to spend millions to repair its sewer lines, which were allowed to deteriorate while millions of dollars went to spanking new systems in the suburbs...
...Known as Main Street at Voorhees, the project is an idealized version of a turn-of-the-century small town, with flower gardens, narrow lanes for strolling, and an outdoor gazebo...
...Ringed by hostile suburbs, one urban center after another in New Jersey found itself too small and with too few taxable assets to remain financially viable...
...And why, as judged from the widening gap between city and state per capita income (down 17 percent in real terms from 1972-87 in one instance, up 24 percent in the second), is its condition growing worse...
...Instead, they simply incorporated as a separate, selfcontained township...
...Havoc and Revolt The story doesn't end there...
...Consumer abundance was to be the great leveler...
...But then I saw Roger & Me," he says, "and I realized it would not be an overnight redevelopment, but would take a long, long time...
...Auto Menace De-urbanization flowed from no one cause, but rather from a systemic change in the American mode of production...
...Once a stage, ferry, and rail hub, the city is now dwarfed by a sprawling highway system that allows motorists to speed past it...
...In Europe, workers had mass organizations, a broad-based socialist consciousness that filtered events and conditions through the prism of class politics, plus a sense of place and history that came from centuries of urban living...
...And, if nothing else, events in Eastern Europe prove that when giant political superstructures do give, they give way with stunning speed...
...Large, heavily guarded parking lots, installed to allow students, doctors, and others to zip in and out of town, ensured that the economic spillover for local shops would be minimal...
...It would have shared in the larger city's tax base, benefited from its municipal services, and exercised greater clout over the state legislature...
...Transportation efficiency would go up as traffic went down...
...As Lewis Mumford observed: In the suburb one might live and die without marring the image of an innocent world, except when some shadow of its evil fell over a column in the newspaper...
...Whereas in Europe the automobile remained an elite mode of conveyance until well after World War II, in this country it was embraced by the American middle class virtually from the start...
...it is an example of how suburbia simply will not let cities be...
...Cut off from Philadelphia, however, by a state boundary, its fate was destined to became more like that of East St...
...On the other 272 • DISSENT Collapse of a City hand, the plan's sales tax component, which raised the rate from 6 to 7 percent and removed exemptions for a wide range of household items from toilet paper to beer, was anything but progressive, and, significantly, it was this part of the tax program that drew the most heat...
...They leaned on public or nonprofit institutions, such as hospitals and the local branch of Rutgers University, to remain in Camden and expand...
...In the mid-eighties, officials heralded the construction of a splashy new marina, the city's first, as a symbol of a gentrified, postindustrial Camden...
...the office vacancy rate exceeded 30 percent, and the state was contemplating spending $750 million to unsnarl traffic that immobilizes the strip several hours a day...
...But the continuation of a suburban system based on subsidized private consumption and deepening public squalor is not practical either...
...The turning point for cities like Camden was the period around World War I, when suburbanization was just getting underway and American cities were feeling the first effects of what modern urbanologists describe as a profound spatial reorganization...
...By improving schools and lowering Camden's "confiscatory" property taxes, as one financial consultant to the city put it, it will make Camden and other cities more attractive to developers and homeowners and more competitive with surrounding communities...
...As the National Municipal Review, a proconsolidation organ, explained: [A] local patriotism, particularly in some of the wealthier and "exclusive" communities, is of such intensity that many would justify an individual existence of these communities for the prestige of their name alone...
...In 1917 New Jersey adopted a law granting local residents sweeping powers to reorganize as separate municipalities...
...Part of the problem is no doubt due to the recession and the vast oversupply of retail and office space in suburban New Jersey...
...Within a few years the marina would go belly-up...
...yet so many people have fled Camden over the last three decades, it's surprising that anyone is left to pay rent at all...
...The Florio plan also suffered from poor timing...
...Excessive motorization has led to hypermobility, so that if Camden is a city to drive through, the state's highway-bound suburbs are as well...
...Despite a history of trade-union militance, the American working class had no political basis for counterposing a socialist program based on public transit, public housing, continued support for heavy industry, and the development of cities that would not only be economically productive but safe, attractive, and livable...
...One problem with home rule New Jersey-style is that the quality of administration varies drastically from one municipality to another...
...But part is also due to the enormous roadblocks the system throws in the path of anything resembling genuine urban development...
...Although there is much the Florio tax plan would do to benefit cities like Camden, there is much it would leave undone...
...It was a prescription the United States earnestly set about putting into practice...
...From his years in Camden, where he'd gotten his start battling the Democratic machine of Mayor Angelo Erichetti, Florio had come to recognize that the suburban system was based on the desiccation of urban centers like Camden and Newark and that rather than being self-sufficient, as its inhabitants liked to believe, it actually required greater infusions of state funds than had ever been required by the cities in their prime...
...The public was not so understanding, however...
...By the early 1900s, Enrico Caruso was dropping by the Victor Talking Machine Co...
...On the other hand, it will not slow the suburban ratables race, impose order on chaotic suburban development, reduce dependence on the automobile, or promote high-density, urbanstyle development, as one high-level Florio adviser readily conceded in a phone interview...
...Because declining development means a stagnant municipal tax base, the great suburban bust that settled on New Jersey following the 1987 stock market crash meant higher property tax rates as municipalities struggle to keep up with rising costs...
...Today, Camden is less a city than a shell...
...Rather than the liberal ideal of expanding individual opportunity, a socialist program would take as its starting point the repair, reconstruction, and redesign of social institutions, in this case the city as a unit of industrial production...
...Because the entire setup is owned by a single partnership, it also has no local democracy...
...Camden's tax rate will go down, but its tax base will still be minuscule in comparison to its needs, and it will still have to spend more than neighboring communities for fire protection and police...
...Class conflict and the hysterical right-wing mood of the post—World War I period added to the siege mentality...
...The years 1946 to 49 saw a renewed strike wave resulting in large-scale capital flight...
...Closely allied with these sentiments is the fear of joining with Newark and its large foreign-born and Negro population...
...New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the union and one of the most thoroughly middle class, had 17,619 cars in operation by 1907, some 163,500 by 1918, and more than 800,000 by 1929, one for every five residents...
...In contrast to the small-is-beautiful, local-control SPRING • 1991 • 273 Collapse of a City nostrums, it would begin by abolishing the beggar-thy-neighbor system of home rule and centralizing municipal functions at a regional or national level...
...Despite well-documented abuses in places like Newark, Trenton, and Paterson, so strong is the prejudice against outside interference that the state has stepped in to assume control in only one extreme instance (Jersey City), and then only after years of hesitation...
...A little-known study by the Federal Highway Administration ("Final Report on the Federal Highway Cost Allocation Study") in May 1982 found, for instance, that automobiles cost the general public 11.8 cents per vehicle mile for air pollution, congestionrelated delays and the like, over and above what motorists paid in gas taxes and highway user fees...
...No longer would Camden be on the periphery...
...established what were to become Camden's renowned shipyards in 1899...
...It has 84,580 people, a third less than its peak around 1950, and just 10,000 jobs, half of them in the public and nonprofit "institutional" sectors...
...It is definitely not the sort of turn-of-the-century small town where soapbox orators harangue crowds, trolley drivers go on strike, or passengers riot over higher fares...
...In an early form of supply-side economics, the state heaped generous tax breaks on local developers, thereby adding to the tax burden on existing property owners...
...With motorization, Camden's role as a rail hub and trolley center declined...
...Smokeblanketed waterfronts had no place in the suburban arcadia to which the middle class now aspired...
...Constructing Unreality Meanwhile, fifteen minutes outside of Camden, a group of developers labor mightily to re-invent the wheel...
...At Main Street, everything's within walking distance," a brochure announces...
...Indeed, Camden-8.6 square miles of urban devastation across the Delaware River from Philadelphia—has so many problems it makes filMmaker Michael Moore's Flint, Michigan, seem poised for takeoff...
...Rather, the market shifts, technology changes, or something about the SPRING • 1991 • 267 Collapse of a Cite reigning political ethos is transformed, resulting in declining productivity and good machinery gone to rust...
...and easy consumer credit to finance things like televisions, dishwashers, and backyard pools...
...Every year, the asphalt expands, the number of out-of-town motorists with business in the city decreases, while Camden's position in the regional economy grows ever more marginal...
...In statewide protests, suburbanites made it clear that they didn't care about the governor's budget troubles and didn't want to hear about the plight of depressed inner cities...
...In an overwhelmingly' white county of 495,000 people, it is 80 percent black and Hispanic...
...A series of disastrous fires destroyed the ferry terminal and slips, a convention hall, and a major church, leaving the city permanently scarred...
...More than 60 percent of its residents are on public assistance, and local people say the busiest time is the first of the month, when welfare checks arrive...
...Inspired by the Palmer raids, local papers ran daily articles on topics like the "Bolshevist Menace and How to Cure It," while a local theater screened a film called Bolshevism on Trial and police rounded up twenty-six Russianborn shipyard workers described as Bolsheviks and Wobblies following a spate of posters calling for a general strike...
...And they also found themselves called upon to do more for their hard-hit city brethren...
...Nor will it bring back jobs in heavy industry...
...they had come to regard certain privileges to be theirs by custom and right...
...In 1990 dollars, the deficit comes to approximately $2.85 per gallon...
...Slash-and-burn suburban development, which began with urban immolation, turns out to contain the seeds of its own destruction...
...Predictably, traffic congestion exploded from a minor annoyance to, in many areas, a minor crisis...
...Campbell's Soup has closed its processing plant, laying off 900 workers, while RCA is considering moving 1,800 workers out of the old RCA-Victor plant...
...This was twice as many cars per capita as Canada and New Zealand, nine times as many as France and the United Kingdom, and forty times as many as Germany...
...it was based SPRING • 1991 • 269 Collapse of a City on a childish view of the world, in which reality was sacrificed to the pleasure principle...
...Unlimited secession meant unlimited municipal tax evasion...
...Because there is no "there" there in suburbia, Main Street is not strategically located at a river crossing or harbor but plunked down arbitrarily in the middle of a field, across from a small shopping center...
...They have a point, although suburbs are themselves careening downhill while sucking up more and more state funds...
...Yet such is the tyranny of the automobile that the local construction code requires an astonishing 3,000 square feet of parking for every 1,000 square feet of office space...
...Just a few miles away are malls, spacious suburban homes, and safe, well-funded public schools...
...One privilege was the right to rule their municipal fiefdoms in near-total autonomy while another was the freedom to wage war on their neighbors like so many feuding barons...
...One plank in the Florio tax plan, which called for doubling income tax rates (from 3.5 to 7 percent) on earnings in excess of $35,000 a year per individual and $70,000 per household, was an unusually progressive move in a conservative era, even if the cutoff is rather low for a state in which a typical family of four earns more than $60,000 a year...
...In 1919, factory workers in Camden rioted in response to a hike in streetcar fares, prompting mobilization of the state militia...
...In the late seventies, an effort was made to alleviate Camden's isolation by building a north-south controlled-access highway through the center of town linking two east-west arteries...
Vol. 38 • April 1991 • No. 2
