CHAPTER 3

Camden: Despite Massive Business Incentives, Still a City of Limited Opportunity

At only nine square miles and with a population under eighty thousand, Camden appeared to fall into an entirely different category from the postindustrial cities that dominated headlines throughout the latter part of the twentieth century. Yet for some years the city competed with Detroit for the distinction as the nation’s most impoverished and dangerous city. If the physical scope of those problems was more limited, they remained of a kind, and when Camden officials began to boast in the twenty-first century of a comeback, the language was much the same as that applied to Detroit or Pittsburgh. Here was a city rising. Unlike in Detroit, that reversal of fortunes owed little either to a planning agency or to the push of community organizations seeking justice for its still highly impoverished residents. Like its larger peers in recovery, the source of Camden’s optimism focused on government subsidies aimed at rebuilding Camden’s once robust business sector. More than in any other city, the partnership between business and government flowed from bipartisan cooperation, one that should have been welcome in an otherwise polarized political environment. And yet, Camden’s recovery, driven from the top and only superficially engaged with neighborhood residents and the hardships they faced, proved every bit as problematic as other ambitious efforts to right the fortunes of struggling cities.

Improbable as it might have been, it was New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie addressing the legislature during his 2015 state of the state address, who made a point of being flanked by Camden city officials and making the case for his pending campaign for president on the basis of his policy changes for the beleaguered Democratic city. “There is no better example of what we can achieve if we put aside party and pettiness than the results we are seeing in Camden,” Christie declared. If crime could be reduced and investment dramatically increased in Camden, he suggested, so too the country could prosper. “I believe in a New Jersey renewal which can help lead to an American renewal both in every individual home and in homes around the world,” he concluded.¹ Fresh from an overwhelming reelection victory, Christie’s national aspirations would soon crash, the victim famously of revelations that top aides had created a monumental traffic jam at the Fort Lee entrance to the George Washington Bridge in retaliation for the Democratic borough mayor’s decision not to endorse Christie for reelection. By the time Christie left office in 2018, his favorability rating had sunk to a historic low, but that did not diminish the magnitude of his attentions to Camden nor the anticipated effect of directing $1.6 billion of tax credits to the city in addition to other changes. The “Camden Rising” declarations festooning shuttle buses carrying employees between the city’s educational and medical institutions may have been more aspirational than descriptive, but there was no doubt that the Christie era represented something new for the city. Not just the national press was quick to respond, even to the point of framing the city’s success in contrast to tragic events in Ferguson, but President Obama, in a trip to the city in 2015, reiterated Christie’s declaration by calling Camden “a symbol of progress for the nation.”²

Ironically, Christie’s largesse toward Camden followed what appeared to be a calculated effort to block his influence on the city. After seven years of state control over the city—an extraordinary measure of intervention justified on the basis of the city’s dire finances—the Democratic-controlled legislature suddenly terminated state oversight just as Christie was about to take office in 2010. Completely hidden at the time was the fact that the man who had been behind the state takeover, South Jersey Democratic powerbroker George Norcross, was making his own accommodation with Christie. According to the governor’s biographer, Matt Katz, the two men met secretly at a Philadelphia Phillies game as Christie prepared to take office, part of his effort to secure support for his agenda from the state’s three top Democratic bosses. What followed was an unusual partnership involving votes for key elements of Christie’s legislative package, including reductions in state worker benefits, in return for lavish support for Camden.³

By almost any measure, but particularly in those set forth by Christie, Norcross, and Camden mayor Dana Redd—public safety, employment, and schools—Camden was “a city rising.” As a perennial candidate for not just the poorest but also the most violent city of 75,000 persons or more in the United States, Camden had demonstrated significant progress toward recovery.⁴ It felt safer, registered a drop in poverty in the last years Christie was governor, and cut its school dropout rate significantly. Good news began to replace the horror stories that inevitably accompanied so many visible signs of social and physical disarray. Still, the city remained far from approaching a balanced budget, its poverty rate exceeded all other areas in the region, and even a glowing testimonial to the city’s improving record on crime reported that its murder rate was higher than Detroit’s and several times the national average.⁵ The central question remained: to what degree would tax benefits for corporations accrue to the lasting benefit of the people who had borne the heaviest costs of living in a city burdened for more than a generation by disinvestment and the many stigmas that accompanied it?

A longtime force in Democratic state politics, George Norcross held no official title but maintained his power in the legislature most directly through his alliance with State Senate president Steve Sweeney, whose power to determine what bills moved forward was sufficient to make or break any governor’s agenda. Representing nearby Gloucester County, the home of Rowan University, Sweeney had one particular common interest with Norcross in advancing the fortunes of a new medical school in Camden at Cooper Hospital, one affiliated with Rowan after Rutgers University president Richard McCormick rejected entreaties from Norcross for a Rutgers affiliation. Seeking his own form of retaliation as well as the resources of the Rutgers–Camden campus, Norcross revealed the depth of his alliance with Christie in 2012 when the governor announced a plan to merge the Rutgers–Camden campus into Rowan as part of a statewide reorganization of medical education. Although the unprecedented takeover of Rutgers–Camden collapsed in the face of a certain federal lawsuit aimed at maintaining the integrity of the contract that made Rutgers New Jersey’s state university in 1954,⁶ very little else Norcross wanted failed, and in his efforts he counted Christie as his most powerful ally.

An insurance broker by profession, one whose ability over time to secure government contracts was unparalleled, Norcross projected his role as a civic leader in the first part of the twenty-first century through his position as board chair of Cooper Hospital, an institution with aspirations to compete with the best medical facilities in the greater Philadelphia region. Under the state takeover, the hospital had been boosted by capital funding for new construction—part of the response to the argument that Camden’s economic recovery rested on the success of the city’s “eds and meds.” Affiliation with the Texas-based MD Anderson Cancer Center helped further boost the hospital’s reputation, as did the advent of the medical school, which effectively drew top faculty from the region to train its first classes. It was literally from his perch at Cooper that Norcross laid out his vision for Camden’s revitalization.

Figure 7. Groundbreaking for Camden’s KIPP Cooper Norcross Academy, 2014. Flanking New Jersey governor Chris Christie are Mayor Dana Redd, George Norcross, and Senate president Steve Sweeney to the left, and Congressman Donald Norcross, to the right. Tim Hawk, New Jersey Advance Media. Pars International, with permission.

Under the headline “George’s Grand Vision” and a picture of Norcross surveying the city from Cooper Hospital’s helipad, the locally based Courier Post detailed the steps Norcross envisioned for “Camden rising.”⁷ Even as controversy engulfed the proposal to merge Rutgers–Camden into Rowan, Norcross cited the need for better public education through the expansion of charter schools. Within months, new state legislation known as the Urban Hope Act authorizing for-profit entities to run charters free from public bidding and disclosure laws was signed into law. Introduced by Norcross’s younger brother, State Senator Donald Norcross, and fashioned in part by former Cherry Hill mayor and head of Cooper Hospital’s philanthropic foundation, Susan Bass Levin, the model quickly took hold in Camden as five such “renaissance” schools formed, including the Kipp Norcross Academy directly across from Cooper Hospital. At the school’s 2015 opening Camden mayor Dana Redd went so far as to praise George Norcross as “the greatest friend Camden has ever had.” In turn, Donald Norcross—now representing the area in Congress—complimented Governor Christie for signing the law. “The system wasn’t working for those children,” he said. “Governor Christie showed courage in understanding what we were dealing with.”⁸

Reflecting George Norcross’s insistence that any city revival depended on ensuring the safety of its residents, an unprecedented reorganization of the Camden police under county control took place in 2012. Like the change in area schools, the new police department opened new positions to possible patronage by requiring every former member of the Camden force to reapply for positions if they wanted them under new, nonunion rules. Christie embraced both changes, touting them not just in his 2015 state of the state address but also with national as well as state media. Following a horrendous spike in murders at the end of 2012, as the police reorganization was first taking place, NBC’s Brian Williams produced a dire feature on the city. Once the reorganization was complete, NBC was back with nothing but praise as murder rates dropped and the city touted its community-based approach to crime. The Obama administration followed suit by featuring Camden police chief Scott Thomson at a White House conference and subsequently sending the president to the city in order to draw further attention to the changes. Neither Norcross nor Christie were shy about taking credit for Camden’s perceived gains.⁹

Following the Norcross playbook, Christie imposed state control of Camden’s city schools, inserting as superintendent a young and largely untried educator of his own choosing. Highly personable and politically astute, Paymon Rouhanifard executed all the right prerequisites of meeting with parents and visiting schools, adding a number of measures for greater safety and accountability of teachers. While the approach was inclusive, its decisive direction was to move the system away from the traditional system toward privately funded operation, using the renaissance model showcased so spectacularly at Kipp Norcross for other entities. During this time his efforts to advance the charter movement were reinforced by a new organization, Parents for Great Camden Schools, run by Bryan Morton, an ex-offender who, with the boost Great Schools could provide to his own employment, garnered rousing publicity by founding and achieving great success with a Little League program in North Camden.¹⁰ Christie himself spent a lot of time praising schools and youth programs in the city, going so far as to attend a number of Camden High School football games and calling for the team’s success.

School visits made for good optics, but behind such reforms lay Christie’s biggest push of all: a string of tax credits, made possible by expansion of the state’s economic development program, an effort boosted once again by Donald Norcross while he was still serving as state senator. The Economic Opportunity Act signed in October 2013, which consolidated five existing programs, lifted limits on how much the state could provide in economic incentives to corporations and developers. With Sweeney’s intervention, it also ensured a healthy portion of credits would go to South Jersey, including a minimum of $175 million for Camden, an amount equal to that dedicated through bonding to back the state takeover under the previous administration.¹¹ As it turned out, Camden did much better than the minimum, pulling in just over $1.6 billion in tax credits while Christie remained in office, and not surprisingly the Norcrosses had a lot to do with which companies got supported.

The first success for Camden under the new law was the location of a new Philadelphia 76ers basketball practice facility on the Camden waterfront. Some forty years earlier, as Camden entered the early phase of converting its industrial facilities at the edge of the Delaware River to mixed-use residential and modern business facilities, the 76ers had flirted with building a new stadium there. But the deal fell apart, and now it was just the practice facility—expected to be state of the art—that would open in Camden. Philadelphia had also courted the franchise, offering space in its Navy Yard complex only minutes from the 76ers stadium in South Philadelphia, but Mayor Michael Nutter confessed he could not compete with New Jersey’s generous tax incentives of $82 million. For this, the 76ers were expected to generate 250 jobs.¹²

With state support highlighted for one company, others who might be induced to relocate to Camden expected similarly generous deals, and they got them. Next up to announce a move was Holtec, a Florida-based energy design and manufacturing firm. Boosted by the promise that manufacturing small nuclear reactors might bring, Holtec agreed to move 160 jobs from its Marlton, New Jersey, offices and create another 235 permanent jobs in return for a $260 million tax break. Although the prospects for sales of such equipment were highly speculative, the company moved quickly to open a new headquarters on state-held port land, where one of Camden’s historically major companies, New York Ship, had once operated. The city thoroughfare of Broadway was diverted in part to accommodate the new corporate campus. The press made a fuss over the company’s effort to hire locally during the construction phase, but when the company opened its 600,000-square-foot design and manufacturing facility in September 2017, at a cost of $320 million, its workforce was predominantly white collar and suburban.¹³

The next company to capture state funds anticipated an even more modest relocation move, from nearby Cherry Hill. Choosing to build its national headquarters on land cleared by the city’s one remaining Fortune 500 company, Campbell Soup, Subaru drew an offer of $117.8 million in return for creating a hundred new jobs and saving five hundred additional jobs. Located at the edge of the downtown where a historic Sears Roebuck facility had stood on Admiral Wilson Boulevard, Subaru’s white-collar workforce was expected to join traffic at the height of the daily rush hour. Its new facility, like Campbell’s and like Holtec’s, sat isolated from the city around it, doing its best to remain so by including within it a full-service cafeteria, an ATM machine, a dry cleaner, and a “grab-and-go” food shop. Quite incongruously, Subaru chief operating officer of sales and marketing in the United States, Thomas J. Doll, proclaimed that “by going in there” we think that “the whole area is going to develop and gentrify, and there’s going to be a renaissance in Camden.” A company spokesperson, Michael McHale, admitted he was unsure how many jobs at its Camden site would be filled by city residents, but he reported that the company was funding local charities to train Camden residents to become technicians, using Subaru’s facilities and equipment. “We’re working with nonprofits to increase the employability for Camden residents,” he said.¹⁴

A cascade of other incentive packages followed: $164 million for the American Water Company, based in Voorhees, New Jersey; $139 million for the chemical manufacturing company ResinTech to relocate its company headquarters from West Berlin, New Jersey, to Camden; $107 million for the Maryland-based security, aerospace, and IT firm Lockheed Martin to move 250 of its 1,000 jobs in nearby Moorestown, New Jersey, to its existing Camden facility; $253 million to EMR Eastern, owner of Camden Iron and Metal, to bring 71 jobs from Bellmawr, New Jersey, to a new facility in Camden; and $40 million to the Cooper Health System, for consolidating 353 back-office suburban jobs in the city.¹⁵

Figures 8 and 9. The historic Sears building, constructed to mark the gateway into the city on completion of the nearby Benjamin Franklin Bridge to Philadelphia in 1926, giving way in 2013 to the formation of an office park anchored by the city’s last remaining major corporation, Campbell Soup. After threatening to leave the city for a location outside the state, Campbell, which backed out of an earlier commitment to move to the Camden waterfront, received state subsidies for infrastructure improvements and permission to tear down the Sears building, despite its listing on the state and national historic registers. In the building’s place, Subaru opened its U.S. headquarters at the center of a sea of parked cars, providing enough amenities for its workers so they would not be drawn into the downtown to eat or shop. Howard Gillette.

The state completed about a dozen additional deals with smaller companies. It was the big packages that drew attention, however, and almost every one of them had a Norcross associated with them. Aside from the Cooper deal, George Norcross’s presence on the Holtec board of directors was certainly a factor in that company’s ability to negotiate such a lucrative deal. Norcross’s brother Philip was similarly involved in bringing the 76ers into bargains with the state. But it was the announcement of an anticipated billion-dollar investment to house new residential and commercial development as well as business offices on Camden’s waterfront that made the biggest headlines. Assuming a commitment made to redevelop the prime waterfront area made a decade earlier under terms for the state takeover, Liberty Trust, based in Malvern, Pennsylvania, unveiled plans to convert a sixteen-acre site devoted largely to parking to mixed-use commercial and residential development. Liberty’s chief executive, William Hankowsky, had started his career in Camden laying the groundwork for the revitalization of the city’s waterfront. Now, as he returned to the city, he cited declines in crime and poverty as well as corporate relocations for his decision to invest. “We’re going to be able to create a sense of place that will allow companies to attract a future workforce,” he declared at a ceremony unveiling the plan in September 2015.¹⁶ Though roundly praised in local media, the project met with considerable skepticism and dismay from some local residents. Reflecting on the presentation developers offered to the adjacent Cooper-Grant residents, Gayle Christiansen described the project as “a white middle class enclave or bubble.” She was particularly offended by plans to use “ambassadors” to watch after the property and to escort employees of the new complex to a new garage across the street. A further comment on Christiansen’s claim agreed, describing that practice as “the perfect racially segregated classism storm visualized through the lens of middle-class America.”¹⁷

It was almost another two years, as Liberty navigated the various hurdles to complete the project, that the state announced further tax credits to support business location to the site. Most prominent was $86 million to support the relocation of George Norcross’s insurance company, Conner, Strong, and Buckelew, from nearby Marlton into an eighteen-story office tower at the site. The award was hardly surprising given Norcross’s role in recruiting other businesses to relocate and his success in pitching the latest waterfront investment to Hankowsky. Joining the Norcross firm at the new location would be the Michaels Organization, a developer of low-income housing with a long record of construction in the city, and NFI, a management services company also based in Marlton, each of which received $79.4 million in tax breaks over the ensuing decade. Both firms had longtime ties to Norcross, who said in a statement, “I look forward to not being a cheerleader for Camden, but being a corporate resident.”¹⁸ Together, the three associated partners received an additional $20.4 million in tax benefits to replace Philadelphia developer Dranoff Partners as the company designated under the state’s takeover to flesh out waterfront construction with market-rate housing.¹⁹ The Michaels project, 11 Cooper, consisted of 156 one- and two-bedroom rental units listed at between $1,200 and $2,000 a month, 20 percent of which were to be made available at reduced rates for households at 80 percent of median income. Fulfilling the fears of nearby residents, Michaels did everything it could to insulate its tenants from the surrounding area, offering controlled access, a manager on site, a concierge, and a shuttle to the high-speed train connection into Philadelphia only a few blocks away.²⁰

Not surprisingly, in a city that had witnessed a number of experiments with corporate incentives over the years, the latest program, despite the generally favorable publicity it garnered, also generated criticism, not the least from residents whose skepticism about the effect of top-down investment strategies stemmed from years of dashed expectations from such programs. Moreover, critics contended, the costs of jobs generated under the Economic Opportunity Act were excessive, and companies were not obliged to maintain their investment after fifteen years, even though they had another twenty years to meet their employment targets. “Regardless of what one thinks about the efficacy of tax subsidies for economic development,” New Jersey Policy Perspective deputy director Jon Whiten wrote in a May 2015 assessment, “all can agree that per-job subsidies that enter six-figure territory—like $685,000 per job for Holtec, $328,000 per job for the 76ers and $196,000 per job for Subaru—are unnecessarily extravagant and unlikely to ever recapture the value of the state’s investment.” While most states support economic development programs, Whiten added, “New Jersey has really taken it to an almost comical level in terms of the overall amount of awards it’s been giving out to companies all over the state and in amount that it’s costing per job. Both are super high compared to what the other states are doing.”²¹ While a handful of companies benefited by relocating, the report pointed out, those companies that did not receive support were left to bear a greater tax burden. Nothing prevented any of the beneficiaries of tax credits from reselling them if they exceeded tax obligations either. The 76ers revealed that they intended to sell a portion of their tax credits. A Maryland-based medical testing company, which was granted $7.9 million in credits to move to Camden where it was expected to team up with Cooper Hospital, was sold two months later for between $8 million and $10.9 million. The buyer, Amarantus Biosciences Holdings in San Francisco, announced it would resell those credits for at least $6 million.²² That so many relocations to Camden came through political connections with George Norcross could not have been lost on anyone under the circumstances.

Of course a program to generate jobs that might help alleviate Camden’s acute level of poverty required job readiness as well as preparation, a factor Mayor Redd stressed in vowing to work closely with the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development “to provide customized job-training courses in work ethics, job coaching and personal finance management to ensure our residents are fully prepared to obtain the jobs from all the economic development activities that [are] coming our way.” With only a modest $500,000 set aside for such purposes, however, the mayor was left the task of convincing companies coming to the city to give priority to resident needs.²³ One way to do that, tested in such circumstances in a range of inner-city locations from Los Angeles to Brooklyn, was through community benefit agreements, and Redd spoke about striking such arrangements with companies as they signed on to tax benefit agreements. But such arrangements never materialized in formal terms. Instead, companies took it upon themselves to do what they could to enlist Camden residents as employees. Subaru announced a program to work with Camden youth to train as auto mechanics. Holtec partnered with Camden County College to train welders, a good portion of whom were Camden residents. And the 76ers, besides introducing a two-week basketball clinic for youth, indicated they planned to help renovate city basketball courts and to create a middle school curriculum using basketball to facilitate success.²⁴ The most recent approach to revitalizing Camden, however, was decidedly top-down, without even so much as nods given to long-term planning or community input. By way of contrast, the municipal recovery legislation as instituted in 2002, though usurping most of the powers of the elected mayor and council, nonetheless provided at least the appearance of direct engagement with city residents and their immediate needs.

The state’s takeover legislation was crafted by Wayne Bryant, who like Steve Sweeney after him, played a critical role in the legislature as senate president. Not incidentally, he owed his political rise to power to George Norcross. A good portion of the $175 million set aside under the bill to foster redevelopment was directed at the city’s educational and medical facilities, a feature in the bill to which newly elected Democratic governor Jim McGreevey initially objected but ultimately acquiesced. Still, more than half the funds slated to attract private investment, were to be directed at neighborhood projects. Before those decisions could be made, the legislation required a comprehensive plan for revitalization, which in turn was to be reviewed by a committee of stakeholders, including neighborhood representatives. The city conducted hearings on the plan when it was released in 2003, before it began targeting neighborhoods for renewal efforts. Some public money was specifically set aside for faith-based projects in recognition of support for the bill from the city’s premier coalition of neighborhood activists, Camden Churches Organized for People. Several major neighborhood projects materialized under the bill, including senior housing across from the politically potent Antioch Baptist Church. Such accommodations affirmed the importance of decades of neighborhood-based activism that emerged out of the 1960s, most often in tension with central authorities. The main thrust of the revitalization plan, however, was the goal of attracting new businesses and residents to the city. If institutional employers would provide homebuyer programs for their employees, the city could reap more taxes from these higher-income families as well as benefiting from the new leadership and institutional connections such residents would bring.²⁵

Tension with city residents did not diminish in the years of state control. When Governor McGreevey announced a plan to remake the working-class neighborhood of Cramer Hill with an ambitious vision for high-end market housing and retail facilities around a golf course that would replace a dump site that had long been a nuisance, opposition erupted. Although residents were unsuccessful in opposing the city planning board’s decision made at a raucous public hearing where none of the six hundred residents attending spoke in favor of the plan, opponents managed to bring the plan to a halt in court on the technicality that witnesses had not been sworn in. Further opposition led to a change in appointments of the state’s chief operating officer and head of the redevelopment authority. Subsequently, the state worked more closely with neighborhood organizations, both religious and secular, in directing local investments. Arguing that the best urban reinvestment strategy is one that combines economic development with human capital development, John Kromer helped redirect the Camden Redevelopment Authority in his capacity as its head for the last thirteen months of the state takeover. Most notably, the authority helped guide a participatory planning process in the Lanning Square neighborhood adjacent to Cooper Hospital that formed the foundation for further investment in the area during the Christie era.²⁶ Control from the top down did not cease during the state takeover. All three Norcross brothers played important roles in determining who was to benefit and how. Even Michaels Development received preferred treatment under the bill. But activists did not leave without some measure of support either.²⁷

The sudden decision to terminate state control of Camden in 2010 presumably opened the way to local leadership, a prospect generally well received with the election of Dana Redd as mayor. A thoughtful and intelligent presence in various government capacities in Camden for years, Redd sought a degree of independent leadership despite the alliance with the Norcross leadership that eventuated in her election as mayor. A graduate of Rutgers–Camden, Redd maintained a low profile during the university merger fight in 2012, simply failing to show up as scheduled to speak in favor of the act at a public hearing hosted at Rowan University in March. Deeply involved in addressing the city’s continued budgetary problems, she understandably embraced the prospect of new investment that the Economic Opportunity Act promised, and she became its most visible supporter. In turn, she was duly rewarded when she stepped down as mayor in January 2018. In addition to being named the new chief operating officer of the Rowan University/Rutgers Partnership formed in the aftermath of the 2012 takeover fight, at a salary of $275,000, Governor Christie signed legislation specially aimed at restoring Redd’s state pension and guaranteeing her lifetime medical coverage, giving her an additional boost to her eventual retirement. Marveling at how well the local Democratic Party took care of its own, Inquirer columnist and longtime Camden observer Kevin Riordan suggested the best label for that organization was not “machine” but “limousine.”²⁸

Not surprisingly, neighborhood organizations were among the first to raise concerns about the state’s new economic incentives and the priority they gave to business. Voicing concerns about the weak strictures for employing Camden residents, Camden Community Development Association executive director Curt Macysyn urged companies relocating to take advantage of “boots already on the ground” by working closely with the community development corporations he represented.²⁹ But Macysyn’s organization, after playing an active role in community engagement efforts sponsored by the Ford and Annie E. Casey Foundations during the period of state takeover, withered in subsequent years. The city’s premier coalition of neighborhood residents, Camden Churches Organized for People (CCOP), which for years had managed to unite African American and Latino parishes, also atrophied, despite a history of effectively bringing politicians before well-attended public meetings to address the city’s most pressing social needs. In 2015 the organization responded to the New Jersey Grow incentives program by conducting what it called a “Sacred Listening effort” soliciting the views of its constituents on the opportunities they hoped for with the influx of new business in the city. Out of that effort emerged a proposal it called “Jobs Not Jails: A Contract for Camden” for which it sought the city council’s endorsement. When the council failed to act, CCOP leaders formed a separate organization, Community Organized for Responsible Development (CORD). After reviewing the experience of community benefit agreement movements in other parts of the country, the organization presented its own demand that incoming businesses contribute to a fund dedicated to job preparation and training for Camden residents.³⁰

A CORD delegation met with Mayor Redd and City Council chair Frank Moran to press their case. According to one of the participants, Raymond Lamboy, director of the Latin American Economic Development Association and vice chair of CCOP, the city leaders rejected their proposition out of hand, declaring that as the heads of city government they were perfectly capable themselves of ensuring community returns on new investments. Further efforts to align their cause with a county-initiated program to train Camden residents for construction jobs expected to be in demand with the influx of new business were also thwarted.³¹ Angered by the response, Lamboy ultimately entered the primary for mayor against Frank Moran, Redd’s designated successor. Making the failure to execute a community benefit agreement the centerpiece of his campaign, Lamboy enlisted a full slate of candidates for the 2017 primary, only to fall well short of victory.³² For CCOP, the unsuccessful benefits campaign appeared to be a last gasp of organizational will. By the time Moran swept to victory in November 2017, the organization had virtually folded.

CCOP’s demise was telling. A central player in pressing state officials to respect resident needs and concerns during the years under the state’s takeover of the city, including a critical public meeting with governor-elect McGreevey that drew more than five hundred people before the legislation was finalized, CCOP was never able to enlist Christie in a citywide forum. Indeed, although Christie frequently visited the city, he never held a town hall forum there, despite holding literally hundreds of them to great effect in other parts of the state. Frank Fulbrook, the neighborhood activist who had sued successfully to block redevelopment in Cramer Hill under the takeover legislation, died in 2013, and other activists narrowed their focus, to the environment, health care, or working for more charter schools. As a consequence, Camden’s redevelopment process fell increasingly into unfettered control of government as it sought primarily to aggregate private investment. In that process, the results were decidedly mixed.

While Camden officials continued to tout improved crime statistics in the city, in one case prompting a banner headline that the crime rate had not been so low for thirty years, their statistical calculations tended to provide a more optimistic picture than was warranted. Using 2011 or 2012 as a point of comparison—when the process of deconstructing the existing police department was at its peak and the murder rate climbed to epic proportions—provided a distorted view of what had been accomplished under the new department.³³ Because the new system was officially a county and not a city department, even though Camden was the only jurisdiction it served, the city was no longer evaluated in annual listings of the nation’s most dangerous cities, despite the fact its murder rate was higher than a number of those that were listed among the top rank. Retention of officers also proved difficult, as many of those trained at government expense returned to their home communities without ever policing in Camden, using their new bona fides to ensure their employment closer to home. Even as President Obama praised the Camden police from Washington once again, the Inquirer reported the department’s problems with retention. In the first two years after the new force formed, more than a hundred officers resigned, making the turnover among the highest in the state.³⁴ No doubt community outreach made a difference, and the employment of modern technologies allowed for quicker response times, welcome elements in areas that continued to experience gang violence. But neighborhoods that had for many years been dangerous remained so. Drug sales continued at a high rate, evidenced by a climbing number of opioid overdoses, the great majority of them suburbanites coming to the city for drugs. The budget in 2017 to maintain a force of four hundred police officers—one of the highest ratios to population in the nation—transferred to the county through a police services agreement, was nearly $65 million in a total appropriation of $190 million. That allocation of $853 per capita exceeded every other major city in the country, including Baltimore ($772), Oakland ($594), Chicago ($537), and Detroit ($450).³⁵

The most striking element of “school reform” was the degree to which enrollment shifted to charter operations, spurred by the introduction of the renaissance model and directed by the state-appointed superintendent. During the Christie years, charter school enrollment rose from 15 percent to close to 60 percent, the highest percentage in any American city except New Orleans, where the public system had almost completely shifted to charter schools after Hurricane Katrina. The next city after Camden in rank of charters, Detroit, another city under state control, reached only 53 percent.³⁶ The only city in New Jersey to utilize the renaissance school option, Camden drew criticism from a 2019 state audit charging a lack of oversight and violations of the law’s intent, particularly the requirement that children in each school’s catchment area be offered admission.³⁷ The city’s two high schools, where social problems had been identified for some years, were greatly diminished. Woodrow Wilson, which for years attracted Hispanics, declined in enrollment from some 1,200 to 700 students, despite a coincident rise in resident Hispanic population to majority status in the city. The city’s premier high school for African Americans, Camden High—beleaguered for years with inadequate maintenance and safety measures—dropped from an enrollment of 1,500 to a mere 400 in 2018, when the state confirmed, despite wide-scale resident opposition, that the historic structure would be demolished to make way for a new school. A good part of the shifting enrollment at these schools could be attributed to charter alternatives, starting with the expansion of the city’s first charter, Leap Academy, to offer three high school tracks, and the addition of other charter alternatives. Norcross Kipp, Uncommon Schools, and Mastery launched under the renaissance legislation, were due to expand from the lower grades to include high school, a process that was sure to benefit from the three years it would take to reconstruct Camden High.³⁸ Residents objecting to policy decisions made in the absence of an elected school board sued under the First Amendment right to petition for a governmental redress of grievances and ultimately won their case in court. But their effort proved a victory without a remedy, as the trial judge responsible for implementing the decision ruled that state control and the policies it fostered had advanced to the point the issue could not be put to a vote by referendum.³⁹

School makeover was part of a concerted effort to attract middle-class people to the city at the expense of longtime residents, charged Keith E. Benson, the president of the Camden Education Association, the union decimated by a drain on its membership to charter schools. “Strip urban schools of their democratic authority, close public schools, simultaneously establish charter schools, reduce availability and access to public housing, attract outside residents, watch housing prices rise out of the range of affordability, and native residents are displaced through higher taxes or rental prices,” he claimed.⁴⁰ Benson had in mind especially the Lanning Square area bordering Cooper Hospital and Norcross Kipp, where rents were approaching $2,000 a month. Upgraded with a refurbished park and new subsidized infill housing, Lanning Square was intended to attract working families who might take entry-level jobs at Cooper and move up the hospital’s opportunity structure. The actual pattern of occupation and rental prices was more mixed, suggesting only a limited level of success. The hospital and its foundation described their work in glowing terms, but even at its best the Lanning Square model was not being replicated elsewhere.

The greatest test of revitalization, of course, was employment, and in September 2017, claims that subsidies to new businesses would have their effect in diminishing unemployment appeared to have achieved some confirmation. Reporting for WHYY, Philadelphia’s public news outlet, Aaron Moselle contended that while the poverty rate had remained static in the region over the previous year, with Philadelphia stuck at 26 percent, Camden’s rate had dropped an astounding 10 percent, from 40.5 to 30.5 percent. Moselle’s source was the Census Bureau’s annual American Survey, and when challenged to explain such a dramatic shift, he followed up with a second story identifying 150 new jobs in the city as a result of the wave of tax breaks, with a projected additional 2,000 to come.⁴¹ While public officials, including Christie, were slow to take credit for the decline in poverty, Camden County Freeholder director Louis Cappelli Jr. finally stepped forward as part of an upbeat assessment of Camden’s rise to cite the American Survey results, claiming, “The economic rebirth is starting to take hold putting more residents back to work and providing access to jobs that did not exist in past years.”⁴² The problem with Moselle’s reporting and Cappelli’s citation of the figures was that they were not accurate. An independent review of the American Survey as of 2017 showed the poverty rate in Camden to be 38.4 percent, not the 30.5 percent reported.⁴³

Clearly, it was too early to see an immediate impact from new business locations in the city in 2016. Most of the jobs brought to the city were already filled by people who lived elsewhere or were open at a professional level beyond the capacity of the city’s chronically unemployed or underemployed residents. Significantly, it appears that companies that were not subsidized did a better job of connecting with Camden residents. Contemporary Graphics, after moving from facilities it had outgrown in neighboring Pennsauken, could count 83 of its 234 jobs as being held by Camden residents. Penji, which spun off from a premier program in the digital design field at Rutgers–Camden, drew on Camden youngsters coming through Hopeworks ’N Camden, a nonprofit community-based training program, as well as other Rutgers graduates. Proving success was not necessarily prohibited by being in Camden, Penji announced in November 2019 that it would be moving to Philadelphia because it could no longer accommodate its growing staff in Camden.⁴⁴

Revelations of the shallowness of any official job preparation effort emerged in the fall of 2018 when a relatively obscure website, RIO-New Jersey, reported Holtec CEO Krishna Singh’s complaint that Camden residents were neither capable nor willing to stay in the jobs he had opened up at the company. “They can’t stand getting up in the morning and coming to work every single day,” he charged, projecting an old stereotype. Once the report had been circulated more widely by Inquirer columnist Kevin Riordan, who assured readers he was convinced from his many years in Camden that residents were willing to work if given the chance and proper training, residents erupted to the point that both Singh and the mayor were forced to offer apologies. Caught without a real program to place residents in those jobs, city and county officials hastily called a “jobs summit” that culminated in a promise from Mayor Frank Moran to create a city office to help residents find long-term employment at local firms. Months after assuring critics that city hall was fully capable of linking residents to new job opportunities, he was forced to actually do something about it.⁴⁵

That Camden residents could be trained for such jobs was evident in the nearly twenty-year history of Hopeworks ’ N Camden. Formed by a Jesuit priest assigned to the hardscrabble neighborhood of North Camden to salvage the prospects of school dropouts who had little choice outside the area’s thriving drug culture, Hopeworks fashioned a live-work computer skills training program that blossomed over time. Starting with training charges to build websites, the program broadened over time to include additional applications, such as coding and geographic information systems. Complementing the provision of marketable skills, Hopeworks staff worked with trainees both to hone essential life skills and to take the next steps in their education, whether gaining a high school equivalent degree or entering college, the kind of integrated workforce training Alan Mallach, in his book The Divided City, identifies as being most effective. With violence escalating during the period of the police department’s transition, founder Father Jeff Putthoff introduced a sanctuary program aimed at helping youth survive the collective trauma they were being exposed to. Prompted especially by the realization that two youth were laughing hilariously after they had discovered two gunshot victims in a car parked near their home, Father Jeff launched a citywide sanctuary program and made it a part of the organization’s curriculum. That effort was made even more central to a program that prepared youth for college and placed dozens of young people annually in desirable employment by Father Jeff’s successor in 2015, Dan Rhoton.⁴⁶ At the jobs summit in September 2018, Rhoton reported that he had attempted, without success, to get Holtec to hire some of the graduates of a program that he said maintained an 85 percent retention rate over the previous year. Holtec’s Singh was notably absent from the meeting, which included a number of other companies new to Camden as well as the city’s major educational and medical institutions. Few residents attended the daytime meeting that was announced on short notice and without much outreach.⁴⁷

Figure 10. Bailey Street, North Camden, c. 2003. Only a short distance from the city’s heralded waterfront attractions on the other side of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, the area continued to suffer neglect into the twenty-first century, its buildings and basic infrastructure neglected, and incidents of poverty high and widespread. Camilo José Vergara.

With a new Democratic governor in place in 2018, Christie’s tax programs, which effectively postponed for years the tax returns that would normally have been harvested from reinvestment, thus putting additional stress on the state budget, were bound to be reassessed. The first evaluation, conducted by Rutgers University’s Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy in New Brunswick, was critical. Pointing to redundancies in existing tax relief programs as well as the high costs per job created, the report concluded that corporate tax breaks “may not necessarily constitute a net return to the state.” The report was especially critical of the high level of subsidies directed to Camden.⁴⁸ In his state of the state address issued in 2019, Democratic governor Phil Murphy drew on a recently issued audit to blast the state incentives plan under Christie as part of a rigged system responsible for “wasted money, phantom jobs, squandered opportunities, and misplaced opportunities.” Although he did not mention Camden specifically, Murphy’s remarks prompted an angry response from Louis Cappelli, who pointed to a laudatory assessment just released on the city’s rising fortunes submitted by Philadelphia-based Econosult Solutions. Not incidentally, the external report, commissioned by the Rowan University/Rutgers–Camden Board of Governors under Dana Redd’s leadership, cited both the achievements and the language that had dominated the local development corporation Cooper Ferry’s annual reports over the previous three years. While its specifics extended well beyond the New Jersey Grow incentives, it pointed to the combination of changes, to police, schools, and additional amenities laid out in the Norcross vision, as essential building blocks in spurring new investment.⁴⁹ Norcross himself took the unusual step of substituting for the mayor to offer the keynote address at Cooper Ferry’s 2019 annual meeting. Using the occasion to challenge the governor’s criticism, he made the bold—and unsubstantiated—prediction that Camden soon would be largely free of the deep state subsidies for operations the city had been relying on to balance its budget for decades.⁵⁰

That narrative was severely tested in subsequent months. Following the state’s critical audit of the business incentives program, Governor Murphy established a task force to investigate the programs and their management by the state’s Economic Development Authority. Chaired by Rutgers–Newark law professor and former New Jersey public advocate Ronald Chen, the effort soon prompted unwelcome news in Camden. In mid-April, reports surfaced that the task force had made its first criminal referral based on its investigation, drawing on evidence “of unregistered lobbying on behalf of special interests.”⁵¹ On May 1, the New Jersey branch of the national investigative site ProPublica, in association with public radio station WYNC and the New York Times, published damning reports drawing on documents that the investigative committee clearly had seen showing that the Economic Opportunity Act that spurred the explosion of tax breaks to business had been modified specifically for Camden at the instigation of the Norcrosses. “Of the $1.6 billion in tax breaks for companies that agreed to make a capital investment in Camden, at least $1.1 billion went to [George] Norcross’ own insurance brokerage, his business partnerships and charitable affiliations, and clients of the law and lobbying firms of his brother Philip,” ProPublica reported. The Camden tower being constructed by Norcross and his two partners that was expected to bring 884 jobs to the city would cost $277,145 per job, more than five times the state average. The law was modified, ProPublica further reported, to allow nonprofits to participate, prompting Cooper Hospital, where George Norcross was board chair, to qualify for a $40 million credit, which it subsequently sold for 93 cents on the dollar to Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield.⁵² The Times added stunning details of how Kevin Sheehan, a lawyer in Philip Norcross’s Parker McKay firm and not a registered lobbyist, managed to change the legislation in a way that raised the level of tax credits its client Holtec could claim from $121 million to $260 million by allowing companies to receive credit equal to their total capital investment. “In all, under the legislation, the state has granted at least $4.8 billion in tax credits extending well into the future, and it appears that the changes made by Mr. Sheehan helped to significantly increase the program’s cost,” the Times concluded. Many of these details surfaced in a task force hearing the following day.⁵³

The Philadelphia Inquirer quickly picked up the theme. Pointing to the unrealized promises of the previous state takeover, it charged in a May 7 editorial, “Without community benefit agreements or a mayor with power, the people for whom Camden is supposedly rising are likely to end up with little to show for the subsidies they’ve helped pay for.” Added liberal columnist Will Bunch, “The stories of one-party sham democracy and Norcross and other insiders profiting are one and the same. Only a rigged government, critics argue, would tolerate a ‘Camden rising’ without addressing the basic needs of most of the city’s roughly 75,000 residents and their complaints about crumbling schools, lack of a supermarket, or the failure to connect them with the waterfront jobs.” Even the paper’s architectural critic weighed in, describing the eighteen-story tower sitting atop a parking facility, pretentiously named TRIAD1828 to link the three partners’ achievement with the incorporation of the city, as “a fortress on the ground,” purposefully removed from the city it rose above. Far from the shiny towers first envisioned for the site, TRIAD, Inga Saffron asserted, “may be a monument to New Jersey’s corruption—complete with prison stripes—but Philadelphians have to look at it. Who was the architect for this dud?” Not out of character, Norcross’s office declined to answer Saffron’s questions about the building.⁵⁴

Figure 11. TRIAD1828, the eighteen-story parking and office facility—with the Benjamin Franklin Bridge to Philadelphia in the background—where George Norcross, with the support of $86 million in state subsidies, moved his company from nearby Marlton, New Jersey. Howard Gillette.

In a pattern that would be repeated in the coming months, Camden area politicians rushed out a press release attacking Governor Murphy’s investigation as politically motivated and unfair to the city’s recovery. Charging Murphy with holding Camden and the business communities in general hostage “to get his massive tax increases through the legislature,” the release suggested that the governor “would be better served following the example of President Obama instead of blindly and for abject political reasons undermining our city on the rise.”⁵⁵ Former governor Christie quickly weighed in to defend the plan, as did a host of luminaries loyal to Norcross in the following days. Lou Cappelli called for the resignation of task force chair Ronald Chen, claiming implausibly that he had a conflict of interest because Rutgers had received funding from the state’s Economic Development Authority (EDA) that Chen was investigating. A further email blast signed by a host of city and state luminaries, including its two U.S. senators followed. The same text appeared two days later as an op-ed in the Inquirer under the names of Senator Cory Booker and Congressman Donald Norcross. George Norcross, claiming bias on the part of the investigation, assembled a top tier of outside council and sued to block the task force from reporting.⁵⁶

The task force vigorously defended its work, retorting that “the only political choice we could have made—but did not—was to disregard the factual evidence before us and ignore these projects because they had important political and financial stakeholders.”⁵⁷ On June 9 it released its preliminary report, only minutes after a judge denied Norcross’s request to halt its proceedings until the court could rule on the lawsuit he had filed the previous month to disband it. The conclusions were blunt and unequivocal, that special interests had altered the particulars of the Economic Opportunity Act for the purposes of aiding their clients and themselves, costing the state as much as $500 million in additional subsidies. Drawing on thousands of previously undisclosed documents, the task force concluded, “Certain aspects of the Grow NJ program’s design are difficult to justify from a rational policy perspective and can be understood only as the result of a process in which certain favored private parties were permitted to shape the legislation to their benefit—and further, in some cases, to disfavor potential competitors. The Task Force has found that the same special interests who successfully impacted the legislative design of the Programs were also afforded privileged status with respect to the Programs’ implementing regulations. The EDA provided these special interests with early information about the regulations the agency was considering, prior to the notice provided to other members of the public, and permitted them to provide private feedback—which, in some instances, the EDA accepted and incorporated into the regulations. Moreover, the influence exerted by these special interests over this process was not disclosed to the public.”⁵⁸

Providing previously undisclosed details, the report described how representatives of the Norcross interests tried without success to exempt Camden from the requirement that companies seeking aid had to be seriously contemplating relocation to another state. That failing, it detailed a series of what it described as falsely manufactured claims that Cooper Hospital and George Norcross and his two partners were considering alternative sites in Philadelphia. But most important, the report showed how Norcross representatives succeeded in altering the program’s intent from generating jobs to attracting investment. Under provisions drafted in part by Philip Norcross’s law firm, “The award calculation for Camden projects is effectively decoupled from the number of jobs created or retained by the company, and is instead tied to—and, unless capped by an applicable statutory limitation, equal to—the size of the company’s capital investment in the project. These provisions have allowed companies that agreed to make large capital investments in projects located in Camden to qualify for awards far exceeding the amounts that would have otherwise been permitted.” Such a shift allowed not just the larger subsidy to Holtec, but covered all capital expenditures, including, it appeared, the helipad atop the TRIAD building, an expenditure the report drolly remarked, “might reasonably be questioned.”⁵⁹

Norcross subsequently denied that state funds had been used to construct the helipad, but in revealing further details of sweetheart arrangements, these involving Cooper Hospital’s use of an underutilized building downtown, ProPublica deepened the picture of insider dealing. Camden officials continued to push back, not the least to a scathing editorial in the Inquirer, “Put Camden to Work.”⁶⁰ Finally, days later, the city announced its own employment plan. Rolled out under the title “Camden Works,” it brought together a number of companies recently arrived in Camden with a group of nonprofits, including Hopeworks ’N Camden, in a multifaceted effort to identify unemployed and underemployed Camden residents for training, placement, and follow-up services. With projected funding of $500,000 a year for four years, the program relied heavily on good will rather than formal alliances. George Norcross and American Water CEO Susan Story were named as cochairs of the new effort, but the real force behind the effort was Cooper Ferry Partnership CEO Kris Kolluri, who reported that he was using his contacts with companies in Camden both to enumerate Camden residents already hired and to identify other opportunities that might be filled. According to a report he sent Camden officials in March 2020, 1,400 Camden residents were working for companies receiving tax credits, an increase of 314 over the previous year. As for funding the new initiative, Kolluri was confident that the organization could secure grants, but no corporate or government money was committed up front.⁶¹ For his part, Norcross left little doubt he was ultimately in charge. A month later in Trenton, at a legislative hearing devised specially to defend the incentives program, busloads of union members benefiting from new construction arrived to provide support, even as a number of Camden residents showed up to protest. Norcross sat by visibly pleased when police physically removed one of his sharpest critics, state Working Families director and Camden resident Sue Altman, before he spent more than an hour defending the program. Although there had been some noise in the hearing room, Altman was at the time looking at her phone and not a part of any ruckus.⁶²

When Barack Obama visited Camden in May 2015, Inquirer columnist Kevin Riordan wrote up the event using the subhead “Obama, Norcross Offer New Narrative for City” directly beneath a picture of Norcross smiling and head to head with the president. “If the emerging Camden of new cops, new school, new corporate headquarters, new manufacturing jobs, and a new master story line has a maestro, it’s Norcross,” Riordan wrote. Three years later, with Christie long gone from the governor’s office and a new and very different president in Washington, Riordan again wrote about Norcross’s Camden, using the runover headline, “George Norcross Wants It Known: Camden Is Rising.” Summoned in response to his essay to meet the South Jersey Democratic powerbroker at a local diner, Riordan duly recorded the accomplishments Norcross reeled off and his dismissal of claims that new investments were intended to facilitate the displacement of current residents. “No one’s talking about replacing anybody,” Norcross retorted. Holding a thick document labeled Camden Rising 21st Century Plan, which he refused to share with Riordan, he talked grandly about its $55 million in planned improvements to city parks and playgrounds as well as to the city’s central transportation center. He dismissed charges that all these changes were intended to make him richer, sounding very much like his longtime friend and sometime neighbor in Florida, Donald Trump, by dismissing such charges as fake news. “I like the fact that the arrow has gone from negative to positive,” Riordan quoted Norcross at the end of his piece. “But I’m never satisfied.”⁶³

In the years leading up to the EDA task force revelations, Norcross was always quick to stress a connection between new investment and benefits to Camden residents. Although jobs and public safety garnered more fanfare, Norcross could point most recently to a $65 million plan to bring new park spaces to city neighborhoods, including Cooper Poynt Park, completed in 2017 at a cost of $5 million on the site where the Waterfront Prison had been located until it was demolished. Isolated from the North Camden neighborhood it was supposed to serve by a sea of parking lots, however, that particular park represented as much an extension of waterfront investment intended to impress riders passing over and through the city on the PATCO Speedline as it was a lost opportunity for development connected to resident needs and activities.⁶⁴ Some of the companies new to the city that Norcross praised were visibly reaching out to neighborhoods through a variety of charitable activities. Following its relocation to Camden, Subaru, for instance, supported a food pantry in the city’s Kroc Center and encouraged its employees to do a day of service in the city, as Campbell Soup had done for a number of years. The 76ers made a number of individual contributions, including funding a computer lab and a renovated basketball court in North Camden.⁶⁵ Welcome as these efforts were, they represented a far cry from systemic investment in human capital. That, the task force made clear, was never the intent of the recent recovery effort.

The political situation in Camden over the many years of its attempted recovery could well be described in terms introduced by Clarence Stone and recently restated by Alan Mallach in his assessment of postindustrial recovery as a “development regime.” Mallach describes such congregations of power as that assembled by George Norcross as coalescing not only around an urban agenda driven by development, but one that prioritizes the particular version of economic development that is most appealing to those interests oriented to large building projects and corporate subsidies. Corporate relocation to Camden followed the script Mallach laid out for such governing coalitions: “A handful of summer jobs, down-payment assistance programs, and operating grants to nonprofit community-development corporations,” which he asserted, “are a small price to pay to neutralize potential opposition to the corporate agenda from the city’s less well-endowed communities.” In that vein, in addition to the city’s belated jobs initiative, Norcross himself announced a Cooper Foundation program of modest community grants ranging from $500 to $5,000 “to support programs/projects/services or capacity building activities and must directly serve or benefit residents in the City of Camden.” By contrast, Mallach notes, “giving Subaru a hefty subsidy to build a new headquarters in a gated complex in Camden may or may not benefit Camden’s people, but it certainly benefits Subaru’s bottom line.”⁶⁶

Judgment on Camden’s approach to revitalization had been made years earlier in a thorough assessment of economic development practice: “The reality of the relationship between jobs and economic development is somewhat counterintuitive: economic development is not synonymous with employment development. Instead, economic development is a process designed primarily if not exclusively, to meet the needs of business elites by encouraging capital investment in particular geographic areas through incentives.”⁶⁷ Indeed, nothing like a formal community benefits agreement was ever struck for Camden residents, though curiously the guidelines for redevelopment in Morgan Village, where Holtec sought the right to direct redevelopment, contained just such a clause.⁶⁸ With the influx of new business, Camden boosters could embrace a sense that the dark days of abandonment and disinvestment had been left behind, and certainly the city benefited from an increased business presence. The growth and rising reputation of the city’s educational and medical institutions complemented and extended publicly underwritten private enterprise. Crime continued to drop, and the city received considerable attention when Camden County police chief Joe Wysocki joined Black Lives Matters marchers in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.⁶⁹ And yet, if the city’s governing coalition was ever to be moved to embrace a more fully inclusive and equitable set of social outcomes, the once vital grassroots organizations that had fought for so long to bring benefits to Camden’s troubled neighborhoods would have to find new life and accumulate more power to make its influence felt and acted upon.⁷⁰