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I published this op-ed in The Courier Post on December 21, 2012.

Camden’s Waterfront Redevelopment:

“Attractions work, but haven’t saved Camden”

Paul A. Jargowsky, Ph.D.
The Courier Post, December 23, 2012

The redevelopment of the Camden Waterfront stirs strong opinions. The new parks, office buildings, museums, an aquarium, and a minor league baseball park have transformed an area that was once dominated by industrial uses. Judged strictly on their own terms, the Waterfront developments are very successful. Properties that were vacant and abandoned less than 25 years ago now host a variety of attractions, drawing over a million visitors annually. Those who said that people would never venture into Camden to look at fish or see a concert have been definitively proven wrong.

Yet the developments are located in Camden and received public subsidies for a reason. They were explicitly intended to help promote the redevelopment, indeed the rebirth of Camden. In that sense, it is easy to argue that the development of the Waterfront is an abject failure. With over 40 percent of its residents living below the federal poverty line, Camden is the poorest city of its size in the country. The housing stock in many neighborhoods is in ruins. There have already been a record number of murders in 2012, most related to the flourishing drug trade. The Waterfront developments, as of today, have not saved the city.

Why have they failed to resurrect Camden? The city’s decline and continued misery were not caused solely by factors within Camden, such as low levels of education and a stubbornly persistent drug culture. Camden’s collapse begins first and foremost with deindustrialization driven by technological change and globalization. Once begun, the decline accelerated when those who had the means to do so fled – sucked out of the city by rampant suburbanization and exclusionary zoning. Unless there is some way an Aquarium can raise labor standards in China or force New Jersey to control the pace and exclusivity of suburban growth, it is unrealistic to expect Waterfront developments alone, no matter how well done, to reverse decades of decline.

Was the public investment in the Waterfront justified? Devastated neighborhoods can and do come back. The Shaw neighborhood was once the murder capital of Washington, DC. Today, it teems with restaurants and jazz clubs. The notorious Bedford-Stuyvesant and Harlem neighborhoods of New York are undergoing remarkable transformations. Changes of this magnitude require a combination of a strong local economy, tangible assets, an advantageous location, and sustained public investments in education, housing, and public safety.

Camden has some but not all of these factors in place. The proximity to center-city Philadelphia is a clear strength. Every major road and transportation line in South Jersey begins or passes through Camden. With any luck, the national economy will continue to recover from the financial crisis, easing unemployment and increasing the availability of investment capital. The Waterfront developments, along with the City’s hospitals and universities, are tangible assets that can play a role in a recovery. One of the city’s main advantages is its location on the Delaware River and a stunning view of downtown Philadelphia and the majestic Benjamin Franklin Bridge. No city in the country would not like to have such an attractive and developed Waterfront.

It is certainly fair to question the share of public investments in Camden that were dedicated to the Waterfront attractions, as opposed to basic housing and public service needs. Yet if the city does recover in the coming decades, the Waterfront developments will come to be seen as one of the catalysts. At the same time, such assets are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for recovery. Without some restraint in the pace and exclusivity of suburban development, and in the absence of larger and wiser investments in education, housing, and public safety, the Waterfront will continue to be a place apart from Camden, serving the region but not the city.

I published an op ed in The Courier Post on 12/16, examining racial and economic segregation in New Jersey.  You can view it here.  It was part of a special feature, “As population shifts, do invisible lines divide us?,” including several other interesting op-ed pieces on the front page of the Sunday opinion section.

There has been a resurgence in research that investigates the efficacy of early investments as a means of reducing gaps in academic performance. However, the strongest evidence for these effects comes from experimental evaluations of small, highly enriched programs.   Such programs may be hard to replicate on a large scale. 

A new paper by Rodney Andrews (University of Texas at Dallas), Kristin Kuhne (Communities Foundation of Texas) and myself add to this literature by assessing the extent to which a large-scale public program, Texas’s targeted pre-Kindergarten (pre-K), affects scores on math and reading achievement tests, the likelihood of being retained in grade, and the probability that a student receives special education services.  The program serves economically disadvantaged and limited English proficiency students.  According to the National Institute for Early Education Research, the Texas program ranks low in terms of class size, staff-to-pupil ratios, and spending per capita.

Nevertheless, we find that having participated in Texas’s targeted pre-K program is associated with increased scores on the math and reading sections of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), reductions in the likelihood of being retained in grade, and reductions in the probability of receiving special education services. We also find that participating pre-K increases mathematics scores for students who take the Spanish version of the TAAS tests. These results show that even modest, public pre-K program implemented at scale can have important effects on students’ educational achievement.

You can view the paper here.  Here is a blog post that refers to the paper.  Here is another blog post in Education Week.

This op ed in the Courier-Post explains why I believe that a Rowan-Rutgers merger would fail to produce a high-quality research university to serve the students of South Jersey:

Rowan-Rutgers Merger Would Fail — Courier Post