Camden, New Jersey: America's Most Desperate Town

A disappointing effort by Taibbi, usually does a lot better. Way too much exaggeration.

Its a dying city because its population dropped about 0.3% per year. Like saying my blood pressure has dropped about 1 point due to some (minimal) exercise in the last month, therefore I'm dead. And then later on the population is now booming because of white heroin addicts moving into the city, but its also dying anyway at the same time or some foolishness.

The rust belt was news and new and insightful in 1970 or so. Unfortunately its almost the spring of 2014. That's all ancient history. Like reading breathless reporting of the activities of Martin Luther (not MLKjr, I mean the original ML). My grandpa thought stories about "rust belts" are "news", and I'm not that young anymore.

"Not long ago" means a century ago, in a nation with a 24 hour news cycle. Uh huh. Just a few moments ago I was driving my covered wagon to work and ... oh wait.

There is some insight in the "future is already here, just unevenly distributed" aspect of the story. Also its got some "true crime" voyeurism.

He's a good writer, usually better than this. If joe average journalist wrote this I wouldn't be as... offended. For my local fishwrap of a newspaper this would be an average tolerable article, which might be why its going out of business slowly, the point is he usually does much better than this.

It is funny to see articles like this on a site with so many hard core followers of urban living. For 99% of the population, Camden is "real urban living" not SV/SFO and NYC. So you can see the disbelief bordering on laughter WRT urban revival. Yeah I can't wait until I can live in Camden and walk to work LOL, sounds like paradise. And Camden is a thousand miles from here, but where I live you need a car and a suburban house and a (short) commute if you don't want to live in Camden-Lite. And that's what the real world is like.

What are these buildings? Are they discount grocers, with cheap but OK food, or are they gas stations, with lunchables and frozen pizzas? It's hard to tell from a screenshot of a map.

I'm not denying that the term "food desert" is suspect, I just can't tell what you're trying to prove.

For folks wondering why this is on HN, there's some interesting info in the middle of the article about the tech the new police force are using in Camden:

"There are 35 microphones planted around the city that can instantly detect the exact location of a gunshot down to a few meters (and just as instantly train cameras on escape routes)."

Based on street view (and my limited knowledge of Camden based on living across the Delaware River in Philadelphia) these are all corner stores and bodegas that in some cases may have some limited fresh food, but most of the sales volume is likely packaged goods.

The idea of a "food desert" as I understand it is that it's an area with limited access to nutritious foods. Most of Camden definitely qualifies, especially for residents without cars.

Check out these maps of shots fired in Minneapolis: http://www.minneapolismn.gov/police/statistics/crime-statist...