Word: camden
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...mowers and the PTA. Left behind were blacks, Hispanics and poor whites, who found themselves pauperized as the town's industries -- and jobs -- slowly disappeared. Similar stories were repeated over much of the Northeast and Midwest, but in many inner cities pockets of prosperity somehow managed to persevere. In Camden everything was hit, and almost nothing survived...
...hoot of Delaware boat whistles and the crunch of demolition crews -- in the past several years, the city has razed more than 1,200 abandoned homes, nearly 5% of its housing stock. On the worst blocks, two-thirds of the buildings have collapsed or burned. "I think of Camden basically as a doughnut," says Joe Balzano, CEO of the South Jersey Port Corp. "Everything worthwhile is on the edges, and the center is hollow...
...suburbs along the ring of that doughnut, with the help of lobbying leverage and clever zoning laws, are able to treat central Camden as a dump. Today the main inner-city industry is scrap: Camden exports 1.2 million tons a year. The waterfront is lined with piles of twisted metal -- rusty foothills to the backdrop of Philadelphia's skyscrapers directly across the river. And in March of 1990, Camden County opened its first trash incinerator, where 1,500 tons of garbage from the suburbs is trucked each day and turned to steam. To complete the sense of a town left...
Perhaps the most compelling symbol of Camden's role as trash heap is the Camden County Municipal Utilities Authority, which processes 55 million gallons of raw sewage each day. Camden's suburbs used to treat their own sewage, but several years ago they began shutting down their 46 treatment plants and pumping all the waste into Camden instead. Says William Tucker, a professor of psychology at Rutgers who has lived in Camden for 20 years: "The stink is enough to kill...
...city provides services, says James Wallace, president of the Chamber of Commerce of Southern New Jersey, and the suburbs provide the tax base: "Each without the other simply could not get along." But the argument that this is a fair trade is offensive to the people of south Camden whose neighborhood reeks of human excrement. Every year these residents, the majority of whom are poor, must pony up $275 for sewage treatment -- the same amount that rich suburbanites pay in communities with names like Tavistock and Haddonfield...