I had a chance last week to attend the fantastic Rutgers-Camden day-long forum on Puerto Rico’s recovery. This speech, by good friend Dr. Héctor Cordero-Gúzman was the highlight for me — he dove deeply into the was that austerity politics and the policies surrounding it contribute to a cycle of leaving the island. The cycle goes something like this: 1) Puerto Rico is in a long-term financial crisis (stemming, in part, from colonial history) 2) it tries to drive down wages and benefits 3) that, in terms, drives people to leave the island, causing the fiscal decline to worsen. Héctor makes a fascinating case that if benefits were to increase, there’d be a better chance to keep people on the island and address some of these long-term issues. That made me think about Camden, and it’s own fiscal instability and policy cycles. 

 

I often tell Camden’s recent policy story (investment in the waterfront, state takeover of education, county takeover of police department and increased subsidies for business) in terms of its fiscal climate. Not only does Camden’s fiscal deficit (in the red since 1985 — a result of white flight, deindustrialization, suburbanization, discrimination and the rest of the cocktail of urban decline) drive the need for investment/policy changes, but it drives the political dynamic of such changes. Much like in Puerto Rico, austerity feels like a short-term necessity for solvency, but ultimately threatens the ability to leave in the city as a middle-class resident. And so jobs that once made up key components of the middle class (teachers, public servants etc.) move towards a model of short-term workers often from outside the community doing a stint of time here before moving to higher-paying communities. 

At the Puerto Rico event, Dr. Juan González touched on the predatory side of that fiscal crisis — the way that Puerto Rico took on exploding debt to try to make ends meet. Camden has avoided such debt, but it’s taken on all kinds of predatory facilities, from prisons, to nuisance businesses, to a county trash/steam plant. 

As an urban ethnographer, I often think of these as Camden’s problems — and think of the potential solutions in terms of regional politics and policies. A big thanks to all those presenting about Puerto Rico who challenged me to connect what I see in the city I live in to the heartbreaking post-Maria Puerto Rico context and beyond.