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Last night was hard. I was there when the Zoning Board meeting started at about 5:15pm. And I was there when the final vote at 11:25pm approved a charity billboard in North Camden — overriding the neighborhood plan which prohibited billboards. There’s a lot to process, but here are three things that have stuck with me today:

1) the billboard will ultimately be another in a long line of decisions that weakened community for the sake of additional financial resources, 2) Camden’s African-American nonprofit community feels locked out of resources, and felt validated by an effort that recognized that deep divide, and, finally 3) that second point was used cynically and politically to set Camden neighborhoods against one another in an effort to gain support for a billboard that had long been fought by both the Cooper Grant and North Camden neighborhoods. 

A quick background on the billboard fight. For decades, Cooper Grant and North Camden have fought the proliferation of billboards in the community. It’s easy to see why — billboards are very lucrative because of commuters who take the Ben Franklin Bridge to get to/from Philadelphia. At the same time, they deeply undermine the neighborhood — a plethora of billboards leads to the feel of a forgotten neighborhood. They affect daily lives in a myriad of ways, from lessening what makes a neighborhood beautiful, to lowering property values, to simply making the neighborhood feel cheap because it is so obvious that the built environment is not for neighbors but designed for those who drive through. No one wants to live behind the back of a billboard. It makes it harder for those trying to make their communities healthy striving places. That is why they are banned in residential neighborhoods.

For years, these communities have fought billboards — Frank Fulbrook was famous for it. The Katz family, which runs a billboard company, was a major part of this battle. As was testified to last night, the Katz family repeatedly tried to put for-profit billboards into the community but was fought off. The latest attempt to add a billboard to the community is this charity effort — in which proceeds from the billboard would go towards Camden nonprofits. 

It is possible to take the Katz family at its word — that this is simply an effort to give back and memorialize Lew Katz in the way they know how, through billboards. But even if this is accepted at face value, it is a deeply unempathetic plan. The plan is to “help” the community by doing the very thing that the community fought for years. That leads me to point #1: 

1. the billboard is the latest in a long line of Camden development decisions that sacrifice local community for resources in a city desperately in need of both

Camden’s desperate financial straights have long been the context of a series of catastrophically bad planning decisions. A prison was put downtown. Waterfront South is home to so many toxic and exploitative businesses and facilities. A second prison was put in North Camden (then, eventually, demolished). The contours of each of these deals was the same. A use that hurt the neighborhood was accepted because it potentially brings resources to a city that desperately needs them. A neighborhood was exploited for resources.

The billboard is a microcosm of those deals. Maybe the harm wasn’t as bad as the most noxious facilities — but the fundamentals of the deal were the same. There is a reason that everyone connected to the communities affected by the billboard testified against it. There is a reason that billboards are prohibited in residential communities. They are not good for them. 

The question isn’t if a billboard is a good idea for North Camden, everyone agrees it isn’t. It is whether the revenues are worth the damage. Deals with that shape have been bad for Camden over and over again in its history.

2. Camden’s African-American nonprofit community feels locked out of resources, and feels validated by an effort that recognizes the deep divide in philanthropic funding

The vast majority of support for the billboard came from the city’s African-American nonprofit leaders. Over and over they testified about how desperate the situations were in their community, how important the services they provide are, and how the money provided by this project is desperately needed to provide those services. 

This is real. Many of these nonprofits exist in a gray zone where their grassroots nature makes them uncompetitive for grants, and they essentially function as informal organizations. The frustration with that setup, and the language around class and neighborhood divides that grew out of that frustration, was visceral in the room throughout the night. And the appreciation to Katz for recognizing that was real and genuine. He has a history of being involved with nonprofits that other foundations and government grantees have ignored.

3. the need for nonprofit funding is being weaponized against an existing community by the Katz family to win a long-running struggle over billboards on the waterfront

Yes, the need for nonprofit funding is real. But in this case, it was cynically and politically used against the communities of North Camden and Cooper Grant. That was the hardest part of being in this room — seeing so many people I deeply respect at each others throats, because two genuine community struggles were exploited by a hubristic philanthropist. 

This is not complicated. Years ago, Interstate chose this location for another attempt at a billboard after years of failing to get billboards put into the community. That latest attempt along the waterfront pre-dated any discussion of the memorial to the Katz family. When this charity approach wasn’t embraced by the communities affected, the company went out and explicitly sought leaders from other parts of the community to fight against the residents in the community affected by the billboard. This philanthropist set community against community so that it could pursue a billboard that had been opposed for decades by the neighborhood affected.

That is a deeply cynical approach to charity. It is one that is aware of the struggles of North Camden and Cooper Grant to maintain their community, but chooses to ignore those struggles. It is one that is aware of the struggles of African-American nonprofits in the city to get funded, but chooses to use that fact to explicitly set community against community and neighbor against neighbor. 

And that’s what last night felt like. It felt like two communities with histories of fighting against overwhelming odds, and one philanthropist who set them against each other to get what he wanted.