the rix mix

Camden set to lay off police, firefighters

CAMDEN, New Jersey (Reuters) – The New Jersey city of Camden was to due lay off around a quarter of its workforce on Tuesday, including almost half its police, to close a $26.5 million budget deficit.

The impoverished south Jersey city, rated as one of the most dangerous in America, plans to fire 180 police, or 43 percent of the force; 67 firefighters, and 150 other workers to balance its budget.

Bad day for New Jersey. Even worse for residents of Camden & adjacent towns. The poor are the most victimized by crime.

Camden is a city in need of the radical downsizing proposed for Detroit; not the downsizing of services, but of the city itself. Whole neighborhoods abandoned & bulldozed (cleaned up & leased for urban farmland is the suggestion for Detroit), population concentrated. It won't happen as an orderly process. Probably the most cost-effective, long-term plan for Camden is to move people out of the place. Not that any other community would welcome them.

Comparisons with Hoboken or Jersey City don't hold. Hoboken is two sq miles in size, Camden 10 sq miles. Hoboken had a strong, prominently Italian-American working class population right up to the time the city gentrified. Jersey City is larger & still has grinding poverty. But both, along the waterfronts - so-called "Gold Coast" - are now part of New York City, extensions of Manhattan. Philadelphia is not Manhattan. Philadelphia isn't a magnet for the best, brightest, most ambitious, & most talented. There's no overflow from Philly, no demand for less expensive real estate across the river.

Even if the sliver of Camden along the Delaware became more than a collection of state-supported tourist attractions, it would have little effect upon the rest of the city. If affluent people resided there, they'd have to be fenced off  & guarded.

Camden isn't the most dangerous town in Jersey. That unsavory distinction belongs to, I think, Irvington.  Now like a beaten step-child of Newark, Irvington  has nothing to which it can hitch its future - not even a train station. Its tax base is gone; there's no reason to believe it's going anywhere but in the direction of Camden.