Two Americas, Jersey Style

Had to work late a few nights last week, and on one particular night, the car taking me home took a wrong turn and got off the highway in Newark.  To get back on the highway, we had to take a number of twists and turns in a protracted urban u-turn involving run-down one-way streets.  Eventually we got back on the highway and made it to the town I live in, Maplewood.

During those ten minutes in Newark, I saw a number of typical scenes of urban decay, some I had seen in various forms before having gotten lost in Newark in the past.  Images a lot of people have probably grown numb to.  I'd like to believe I haven't fallen into that category, but the truth is, it's something I don't encounter in my day-to-day.

I feel fortunate to live in Maplewood.  It's the kind of place I imagined raising my kids in.  It's progressive, it has an urban sense to it given all the Brooklyn ex-pats that move there, it's quaint without feeling too small.  But here's something I don't usually think of when I think of Maplewood.

There's Maplewood on the left, Irvington (which feels a lot like Newark) sits in the middle, and Newark comes next on the right.  Maplewood and Newark practically neighbor each other and the two places couldn't be more different.

Now I don't want to make it sound like Newark is hell on earth, the downtown Ironbound district is pretty nice.  Around Newark Penn Station (not sure why they chose the same name as New York Penn Station), there's the Prudential Center where the New Jersey Devils and Nets both play... at least until Jay-Z moves the Nets to Brooklyn.  There's also a number of really great Portuguese and Spanish restaurants as well.  A lot of this Ironbound success came from an effort to revitalize downtown around a sports arena, a plan borrowed from Baltimore (more Baltimore later).  Also, the PATH system connected the Ironbound district directly to Manhattan, so now it was possible to easily live in Newark and work in Manhattan.

Get a few blocks away from the Ironbound district, however, and the scene changes rapidly.  Here are some pictures from around the interwebs that highlight some of the views.  I've personally seen one of the buildings (the first), but the others are representative of some of the harder hit areas.

On my drive through last week, I saw some abandoned buildings and a few abandoned construction projects, all in about ten minutes.

Now here's the tree-lined park around the corner from my house that I take my kids to play in.

Beyond this park is the town's country club that allows my kids' pre-school use of their private pool.  Sure, that's the only time my family will be allowed inside the club since I'll never be able to afford a membership, but just living in a town like Maplewood (or any town like it anywhere in the country) has spill-over effects.

Cherry-picking Newark detritus aside, that's not even the worst New Jersey has to offer.  Camden, NJ may be the hardest hit area in the state.  A few years ago, it had the highest violent crime rate in the country, almost six times higher than the national average.  Almost half the people in Camden live below the poverty line.  Three recent mayors went to jail on corruption charges.  The police department and school system had to be taken over by the state to keep them operational.

Let me introduce you to some of the sights of Camden, NJ.

Now let me throw up another Google Map excerpt:

There's Camden on the left next to the A marker.  Over on the lower right, just above a I295 graphic, is the town of Cherry Hill, median income north of $87,000 a year.  One of the wealthier towns in the state.  A little further away than Maplewood is to Newark, but not drastically so.

I don't want to imply that poverty only strikes urban areas.  Rural poverty is also an epidemic, I just happened to focus on areas in my general backyard.  My point with all of this was only to highlight that there are parts of this country broken almost beyond repair.  Not esoteric debt-ceiling, TARP, credit default swap, federal reserve areas.  Areas that people have to come home to and raise their children in.  Imagine raising your kid in the violent crime capital of the country.  Imagine reading about oil company subsidies and the Bush tax cuts while you try to raise your kid in the violent crime capital of the country.

I was a John Edwards supporter during the 2008 democratic primary because he seemed to be the only candidate specifically addressing poverty in his campaign.  Who knows what would have happened if he actually won or hadn't made those interesting acting choices?  But at that moment, he brought poverty to the forefront every time he got up to speak.

Poverty feels like an issue politicians bring out to hint at some humanity and then put away to deal with more politically pressing issues.  I believe that those shouting for hardcore, free-market economies ignore or forget how ruthless free markets can be.  They are part of the reason we have places like Newark and Camden and they will never help save them.  What free market force would ever inspire a company to move in to Camden with its crime rate, unless that company was given tax breaks and imminent domain to displace everyone, tear down the city, and build it up into some industrial complex from scratch?  I bet there's a free-market supporter responding to that last idea with a "well if that's what the market wants..."

On some level, it was even hard to take Edwards seriously on the subject.  Sure he was the son of average parents, but the fact remained he had grown quite wealthy.  He clearly had advantages that most Americans don't have (e.g. dreamboat hair).

For me personally, my most impressionable and intimate exposure to urban poverty came in the safe package that is a television show.  The Wire, a fictional show created by David Simon (a former Baltimore Sun reporter) and shown on HBO, appears to be a typical cop show at first.  Set in Baltimore, it follows a wiretap team eavesdropping on a key player in the Baltimore drug scene.  But it soon blossoms to intimately humanize heartache and corruption at every level of the city.  The cops, the drug dealers, the docks, the schools, real estate, city hall, and finally the newspapers themselves.  Sure The Wire has its faults and its biases, but in a time when the politicians whose job it is to help fix poverty ignore the issue, at least someone had the courage to attempt an honest depiction of the hardships so many people face.  The Wire is easily the best thing I have ever seen as a whole, the modern-day equivalent of a Charles Dickens novel, and in my mind, required viewing for anyone interested is learning about another side of our country.  The following is definitely not safe for work.

When I see trump speeches on the congressional floor, or read about our leadership callously favoring the richest sliver time and time again, I can't help but feel like those government officials are helplessly out of touch with the realities of the country they were asked to govern.  On another level, I can't entirely blame them because we've created a system that makes it too easy to ignore poverty.