COMMENTARY: Residents must fight Camden High plan

Recently, a lot of attention has been dedicated to presumed greatness of a new Camden High School. But to discuss a new Camden High School and the destruction of the existing Camden High that anchors the Parkside community, and neglect to mention broader development efforts planned for Parkside, is grossly incomplete.

As you read, plans are in motion to expand Cooper University Hospital’s and Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center along Haddon Avenue, dubbed the “Medical Mile.” A new takeover school, UnCommon, is currently under construction on Haddon Avenue, and plans for new shops and bike paths are all in the works for Parkside.

While some with political and economic power in Camden view such developments as “progress” and “revitalization,” they are neglecting to take into account the impact it will have on Parkside residents who do not have the economic wherewithal to withstand the rise in taxes and rental rates that are sure to follow — thus, possibly displacing many.

Further, in order to “flip” a neighborhood, development and the collapsing of existing schools are prerequisites to changing the demography of a neighborhood. Indeed, what drove “white flight” was not urban riots of the 1960s or urban blight of the post-industrial age. It was Brown v. Board of Education, integrating schools. For the vast majority of urban working- and middle-class white parents, particularly in the North, this was unacceptable and many opted to flee urban areas for the suburbs en masse.

With racist housing and employment practices like redlining, coupled with discriminatory lending policies from banks, most urban black people were both locked in cities and underemployed. Certainly, some black people were able to achieve success academically and economically, and rather than stay within cities experiencing deliberate divestment, they opted, too, to move to suburbia.

Today, however, cities nationwide are ushering in a “back to the city” movement targeting white millennials and the black middle class — and Camden is no different. With all the development planned for the Waterfront and the expansion of “meds and eds” along Broadway, there is little doubt the powerful elite in Camden, who have no use for the low-income minorities living here, have planned for their displacing, thus achieving neighborhood turnover.

This is why the issue of the future of Camden High School is so important. A massive body of research connects home prices to perceived local school “quality” (with quality invariably indicating affluent and white). For this to take place, and for the mayor’s development plans to bear fruit for Camden’s connected class and powerful outsiders, the current Parkside neighborhood cannot exist.

To developers and city planners, the present Camden High School is a deterrent to prospective middle-class homeowners, both black and white, because the school (beautiful as it is) is attended by black and Hispanic children and is keeping local properties feasible for lower-income residents to afford. As such, the school has to be torn down for the “new” Parkside.

The proposal of a new Camden High School is really part of a broader Parkside development strategy intended to benefit a targeted few and victimize lower-income residents. This behavior, sadly, is consistent from our local politicians, but an honest conveyance of this issue would go far in educating our Camden community about what we stand to lose if Camden High is torn down.

We, as a community of people who care about our neighbors, must fight this, because our collective future here depends on it.

Dr. Keith E. Benson is a teacher at Camden High School.