In Camden, $2.5 Million and a Promise to Finish What Was Started at the Yaffa Site

CAMDEN — There are addresses in every old industrial city that longtime residents learn to look past. A fenced lot. A patch of ground where something used to operate and then didn’t, left behind to weeds and rust and the slow work of being forgotten. The former Yaffa site at Sixth and Chestnut streets in Camden was harder to ignore than most: for years it sat under a four-story pile of illegally dumped dirt, and the ground beneath it is still contaminated. This week, it got a little harder to look past — in the best way.

On Thursday, Camden County Commissioners stood alongside Camden Mayor Victor Carstarphen and Congressman Donald Norcross to mark a $2.5 million award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to continue cleanup at the site. It’s the kind of announcement that can read like a line item if you’re not from here — another grant, another ceremony, another round of handshakes. But stand in the neighborhoods that ring these sites and it reads differently. It reads like someone finally came back to finish the job.

Why cleanup is never abstract here

That’s the thing about environmental cleanup in a city like Camden. It isn’t abstract. A contaminated parcel isn’t a policy problem for the people who live two blocks from it — it’s the lot their kids walk past on the way to school, the ground they’ve been told, quietly, not to let the dog dig in. For years in this country, cities like Camden got the factories and the freight and the fallout, and then got left holding the cleanup bill long after the jobs moved on. Money like this is, in part, a correction of that old arithmetic.

Federal cleanup dollars tend to arrive slowly and in stages, and $2.5 million is a continuation, not a ribbon-cutting on a finished park. Remediating a site like this is unglamorous, years-long work — testing soil, hauling contaminated material, monitoring groundwater, verifying the ground is safe enough to hand back to a neighborhood. What the award buys is the next chapter of that work, and the credibility that comes with a federal agency, a mayor, and a member of Congress all saying, on the record, that the work will go on.

What comes after

The hopeful part is what comes after. A cleaned parcel in Camden is rarely just a cleaned parcel. It’s a candidate — for new housing, for green space, for a small business, for any of the things a lot can become once it’s no longer something to avoid. The best outcome at a place like Yaffa isn’t an empty, safe lot. It’s a lot that gets to be part of the neighborhood again.

I’ve learned to pay attention to these stories because they almost never make noise. Nobody throws a parade for soil remediation. But drive past a corner that spent a generation behind a chain-link fence, and then drive past it a few years after the trucks and the crews have done their work, and you’ll understand why it matters. The ground that a city gives up on is the ground a city has to fight to get back.

The ground that a city gives up on is the ground a city has to fight to get back.Max Cedar

In Camden this week, somebody chose to keep fighting for a corner this city spent years trying to get back. That’s worth noticing.

Based on reporting from Camden County, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, KYW Newsradio and The Philadelphia Inquirer.