An esplanade in Camden, New Jersey, in 2013, with Philadelphia across the Delaware River. The 76ers announced they will move their practice and administrative facilities to Camden. Andrew Burton / Getty Images

CAMDEN, N.J. — It’s been a big summer for New Jersey’s most troubled city. In June the state’s Economic Development Authority (EDA) announced that the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team will move its practice and administrative facilities to Camden’s riverfront. (It will still play games in South Philly.) The practice facility will bring 250 jobs to Camden, although 200 of them are already filled and will simply be shifted from the existing site. The next month, the agency unveiled a plan for Holtec International to establish a factory in Camden to manufacture nuclear-power-plant equipment. The company promises to bring 395 jobs — 160 of which are already filled and will be relocated from other factories — for the massive new facility in the southern, industrial strip of the waterfront. The deals were accompanied by a total of $342 million in tax subsidies and credits. “In the bigger picture, an important part of the value of these incentives is the ripple effect they have on an area, particularly a distressed one,” EDA spokeswoman Virginia Pellerin told the Courier-Post after the announcement of the Holtec deal, the third-largest single tax break in New Jersey’s history. Peter Toso, for one, is unimpressed. He is the owner of A Little Slice of New York, a pizzeria in a largely vacant block of downtown Camden. (Other denizens of the block include a storefront law office, a fruit shop and the long-abandoned Viral’s Food Market.) Toso opened his restaurant in 1992, just as the state’s and county’s first investments in the revitalization of Camden were coming to fruition. More than two decades later, his store remains one of the only small businesses in Camden’s downtown and riverfront areas, where most of the public investment has been directed. “All that development on the waterfront has done little to [nothing] for the city,” says Toso, whose pizzeria is a few blocks north of the stately City Hall and on the western outskirts of the sprawling Rutgers University at Camden campus. “[Downtown] we have a mass exodus at 4:30 [p.m.]. No one stays in the city and patronizes any of these establishments.”

Camden, once a large industrial town, watched its population dwindle as manufacturing left and has been marred by problems like high unemployment, murders, heavy drug trafficking and other crimes for decades. Andrew Burton / Getty Images For him, it all comes down to taxation. The city’s budget in fiscal year 2013 was $150.2 million, but only $43.1 million came from property taxes and other local sources. (The state provided the funds to cover the other two-thirds.) The site of the Holtec development is owned by the South Jersey Port Corp., and the lot for the 76ers facility is owned by the Camden Parking Authority but will be purchased by the EDA before construction begins. None of these agencies are subject to local property taxation, so neither Holtec nor the 76ers will contribute significantly to the local tax base. “Everything on the waterfront and the downtown area is either tax exempt or a PILOT [payment in lieu of taxes],” says Toso, referring to small fees that nonprofit, nontaxable institutions sometimes pay voluntarily to their host cities. “It’s great that Holtec is bringing jobs, but it’s more nonratable land. They can’t just keep giving it away.” (Nonratable land is not subject to property taxes.) The 76ers and Holtec deals are the latest extension of a strategy that state and local policymakers have been promoting since the late 1980s. Hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and other types of public funding have been used to attract major institutions to Camden’s long-decrepit downtown and riverfront — with, critics say, negligible benefit to residents or the local economy. Says Toso, “[Holtec and the 76ers] are the same thing. It’s a regurgitation of a regurgitation of a regurgitation.” For Toso, it all comes down to taxation. The city’s budget in fiscal year 2013 was $150.2 million, but only $43.1 million came from property taxes and other local sources. (The state provided the funds to cover the other two-thirds.) The site of the Holtec development is owned by the South Jersey Port Corporation and the lot for the 76ers facility is owned by the Camden Parking Authority, but will be purchased by the Economic Development Authority before construction begins. None of these agencies are subject to local property taxation, and so neither Holtec nor the 76ers will contribute significantly to the local tax base. “Everything on the waterfront, and the downtown area, is either tax exempt or a PILOT [payment in lieu of taxes],” says Toso, referring to small fees that nonprofit, nontaxable, institutions sometimes pay voluntarily to their host cities. “It’s great that Holtec is bringing jobs, but it’s more nonratable land. They can’t just keep giving it away.” (Nonratable land is not subject to property taxes). The 76ers and Holtec deals are the latest extension of a strategy that state and local policymakers have been promoting since the late 1980s. Hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and other types of public funding have been used to attract major institutions to Camden’s long-decrepit downtown and riverfront — with, critics say, negligible benefit to residents or the local economy. Says Toso: “[Holtec and the 76ers] are the same thing. It’s a regurgitation of a regurgitation of a regurgitation.” For Toso, it all comes down to taxation. The city’s budget in fiscal year 2013 was $150.2 million, but only $43.1 million came from property taxes and other local sources. (The state provided the funds to cover the other two-thirds.) The site of the Holtec development is owned by the South Jersey Port Corporation and the lot for the 76ers facility is owned by the Camden Parking Authority, but will be purchased by the Economic Development Authority before construction begins. None of these agencies are subject to local property taxation, and so neither Holtec nor the 76ers will contribute significantly to the local tax base. “Everything on the waterfront, and the downtown area, is either tax exempt or a PILOT [payment in lieu of taxes],” says Toso, referring to small fees that nonprofit, nontaxable, institutions sometimes pay voluntarily to their host cities. “It’s great that Holtec is bringing jobs, but it’s more nonratable land. They can’t just keep giving it away.” (Nonratable land is not subject to property taxes). The 76ers and Holtec deals are the latest extension of a strategy that state and local policymakers have been promoting since the late 1980s. Hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and other types of public funding have been used to attract major institutions to Camden’s long-decrepit downtown and riverfront — with, critics say, negligible benefit to residents or the local economy. Says Toso: “[Holtec and the 76ers] are the same thing. It’s a regurgitation of a regurgitation of a regurgitation.”

‘For the overwhelming majority of people in Camden, it does not appear that those institutions touch their lives.’ Gordon MacInnes president, New Jersey Policy Perspective

Public subsidies for developments in Camden have been vast in scope. On the waterfront, there was the initial $52 million in state funds for the now privatized Adventure Aquarium (completed in 1992); an initial $20 million from public agencies and state, county and federal government sources for the Battleship New Jersey Museum and Memorial (opened in 2001); $17 million for the Susquehanna Bank Center (opened in 1995 under a different name); and at least $15 million for an aerial tram to Philadelphia that never came to be. Cooper University Hospital, a few blocks inland, regularly receives public funding from the state, including $52 million in 2012, according to the The Philadelphia Inquirer. And the military contractor L3 Communications (a remnant of industrial goliath RCA) won an estimated $34 million to “stay put,” in the words of Cornell University professor Jefferson Cowie. The city received $175 million in aid when the state took over the powers of the city government from 2002 to 2010. But as the Inquirer’s Matt Katz reported in 2009, $100 million of that was directed toward large private institutions, including expansions of the aquarium and the hospital.

Abandoned homes in Camden in June 2014. Emile Wamsteker / Bloomberg / Getty Images Prior to these investments, the city’s riverfront and downtown were littered with rusting industrial hulks, vestiges of Camden’s heyday. After World War II, industrial capital began a long retreat from the city after losing a series of brutally contested union organizing campaigns in the 1930s. By 1962 three companies employed 70 percent of the workers: Campbell Soup, New York Ship and RCA, which had already relocated thousands of low-skill jobs to Bloomington, Indiana. During the 1960s, Camden lost half its manufacturing jobs, and white flight intensified. (Camden became majority black during the 1970s.) The tax and employment bases were destroyed simultaneously. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, powerful South Jersey interests, led by political boss George Norcross, reoriented the development strategy toward tourism and eds and meds (universities and hospitals).

“The city is being reborn from the waterfront out,” Frances Burnstein, then–executive director of the suburban Cherry Hill Chamber of Commerce, told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1988. “It will be a new Camden.” Fifteen years later, with no evidence of that rebirth and the state taking over the city’s legislative and executive bodies, the developer of the RCA Victor apartment building, Carl Dranoff, enthused, “Camden is happening. It’s not going to be the poorest city 10 years from now. Our property, which was once the symbol of blight, will be the symbol of a remarkable revival. How could it fail, with all the energy and creativity — and cash — flowing into it?” Today Camden’s downtown and waterfront are well maintained, and the vacant buildings in the core are not in gross disrepair. That contrasts with nearby Chester, another small, deeply impoverished, postindustrial city 20 miles down the Delaware River. But the sights and sounds associated with urban life — bustling streets, small businesses crowded into storefronts, the buzz of corner conversations — are largely absent. “For the overwhelming majority of people in Camden, it does not appear that those institutions touch their lives,” says Gordon MacInnes, president of New Jersey Policy Perspective, a liberal think tank. “This is not to say nothing has been done … but these are marginal improvements.”

‘If this pizzeria was in proximity to any other university in the country, I’d be out on the golf course right now.’ Peter Toso owner, A Little Slice of New York