On Broadway in Camden, a Grocery Store Is Also a Promise

If you want to understand what nearly a million dollars means to a neighborhood, don’t start with the check. Start with the walk to buy a gallon of milk. In Waterfront South — the tight grid of streets tucked below the bridges in Camden — that walk has been a real problem for a long time. This is the kind of neighborhood that shows up in reports under the phrase “food desert” as if the people living there were a statistic instead of families who just want a decent place to shop close to home. The folks at Heart of Camden have spent decades refusing to accept that as permanent. This week, they got some help.

New Jersey American Water, working with the state’s Department of Community Affairs, announced $950,000 in funding split between two Camden nonprofits — Heart of Camden and the Parkside Business and Community in Partnership — through the Neighborhood Revitalization Tax Credit Program. It’s a mouthful of a program name for something that, on the ground, comes down to bricks, jobs, and the small daily dignities that make a place feel like home.

What the number actually buys

For Heart of Camden, the money feeds its Broadway Gateway initiative, and the details are the kind I love because they’re specific and stubbornly practical. There’s the historic Olsen Building at 1811 Broadway, being redeveloped rather than demolished — because somebody there understands you don’t have to erase a neighborhood’s past to build its future. And there’s a planned neighborhood grocery market at 526 Ferry Avenue. A grocery store. In a place that has gone without one. That’s what the headline number actually buys: the end of that long walk for milk. The broader plan folds in new arts, retail and community space while holding onto a historic landmark — the through-line in everything Heart of Camden does. They are not in the business of parachuting in, knocking things down, and calling it progress.

A relationship that compounds

What struck me is that Tuesday’s announcement isn’t a one-time gesture. Since 2022, New Jersey American Water has put more than $600,000 into Heart of Camden’s Waterfront South work through this same tax-credit program. Zoom out further and the company has channeled roughly $13.4 million into New Jersey neighborhoods through the program since 2010. That’s not charity in the drop-the-check-and-leave sense. That’s a utility deciding, over and over, that the health of the neighborhoods it serves is part of its own business.

The truest measure of a community’s direction isn’t the ribbon-cuttings downtown. It’s whether the block that everyone forgot is getting a little more livable each year.Max Cedar

The people of Waterfront South didn’t wait around to be rescued. Organizations like Heart of Camden have been doing this stubborn, unglamorous work for years, one building at a time, long before the funding announcements came. What this money does is meet that determination halfway — and in a neighborhood overlooked for generations, halfway is a lot further than they’ve been met before. Next time you’re crossing one of those bridges into Philadelphia, glance down at the streets below. Something good is being built down there. Slowly, on purpose, and to last.

Based on reporting from ROI-NJ, NJBIZ, New Jersey Business Magazine, and New Jersey American Water.