ABSTRACT
During 2007 and the first month of 2008, I spent nearly all of my working days managing the City of Camden, New Jersey’s planning and development agencies. Camden has all of the disinvested-city problems described in the preceding chapters-a protracted loss of businesses, jobs, and people, a steadily eroding tax base, a proliferation of vacant and abandoned properties, a depopulated inner-core area, and more. At the same time, Camden may have more competitive advantages-a central location in the metropolitan region, a cluster of academic and health care institutions based in the city’s center, and a master-planned waterfront anchored by regional visitor attractions, to name a few of the most evident ones-than any other disinvested city of its size (about nine square miles, about 80,000 people). Many opportunities to take advantage of these competitive advantages have remained unfulfilled over the years, largely due to a combination of corruption, mismanagement, and political interference that produced a disorganized, unreliable, and untrustworthy municipal government. During the thirteen months that I spent in Camden as part of a state-mandated recovery plan, I was in a position to use the authority and resources available to me to help the local public sector get past some of these problems, at least for a time, and-if I succeeded in doing so-to play a constructive role in downtown and neighborhood revitalization.
