Organizing Orange
Working in the shadows of New York, Jersey activists face a fractured social and political landscape
It was just before election day, 2023 — an off year for national politics, meaning only the most impassioned voters were gearing up for local elections across the country.
Kweli Campbell, a tall, middle-aged New Yorker with dark skin and intense eyes, was knocking on apartment doors to voice support for her favored candidate for the school board in Orange, New Jersey.
School board votes are a particularly hard sell for apathetic voters since many don’t have kids in the school system. But Campbell insisted this vote could shake up the city. The incumbents were old friends of the mayor, whom Campbell opposes; the challenger was India Williams, an outsider and an activist for neurodivergent children. “She’s a perfect example of New Jersey activism,” Campbell said.
Going door to door along with fellow supporters of Williams, Campbell wasn’t just canvassing. She was also recruiting.
Campbell moved to Orange from Brooklyn three years ago to get away from the COVID-19 pandemic. She now commutes to her job in New York as an IT specialist for the city, but the focus of her activism has shifted to her new home. In Brooklyn, she had organized a large social media group in her neighborhood of Clinton Hill to discuss issues surrounding the rapid gentrification of the area. Now, the neighborhood chat hosts block parties and street cleanups — with members on both sides of the class divide. When Campbell resettled in Orange, about a half-hour train ride from Manhattan, she expected to continue this community activism. She did not realize that here, west of the state line, making progress would be significantly harder.
Littered with the detritus of a post-industrial city — an old hat factory; a wristwatch manufacturer that poisoned its employees with radioactive paint and inspired the film Radium Girls — Orange is just 12 miles from Midtown Manhattan. Thirty-four thousand people live there, according to the latest census estimate; most of them are Black and rent their homes. It is not the poorest city in Northern New Jersey — Newark, a few miles west, is slightly poorer — but 20 percent of the population lives in poverty and the per-capita income is one-third that of neighboring South Orange. A major highway, Interstate 280, runs through the middle of the city, cutting off residential areas from the downtown. Orange is an exclave of rust belt, equal parts quaint and gritty, well within the New York metro.
Campbell walked to 765 Vose Avenue, part of an apartment complex that looms over the border between Orange and South Orange, marking the sharp line between the leafy, white suburb and the mostly Black city. The crumbling bricks of the apartment towers had long housed working-class families, migrants, and a handful of students. At the border, the line formed by disinvestment remained clear in the grass — often literally greener in South Orange.
It was not the same in New York City. There, millionaires and people in public housing lived across the street from one another — but in one city. They had the same mayor and the same city services. In New Jersey, things were much more fractured and confused. “The politics are backwards and their laws are convoluted,” Campbell said. It created a whole new set of problems for organizers. “Poverty looks different out here.”
When Campbell entered the Vose apartments, Maggie, a Haitian mother of five who by election day was just hours from eviction, stopped to chat. She knew Maggie from visiting Vose, a hotbed of quality-of-life issues and habitability violations — many of them unreported and unresolved. Maggie’s time there was running out. The complex’s shadowy landlord, name and face hidden behind a limited liability company, had granted her a weeklong extension on her rent. She was uncertain how she could pull the money together.
Moving along, Campbell saw neighbors she didn’t know. That’s when the recruitment started.
“Hey, how’s it going,” she’d open. “I’m your neighbor, I live around here.”
After discussing the election, city politics, and her efforts to clean up nearby Metcalf Park, she invited them to a WhatsApp group. Orange had issues. Communication was a key step toward solving them.
The problems and politics of Orange are defined by two major quirks of the map: The dominant presence of New York City, just over the horizon, and the curious municipal shape of New Jersey.
Divisions between the Dutch and the English, Quakers and Anglicans, Anglo-Saxon teetotalers and supposedly hard-drinking migrants turned early New Jerseyans into local control zealots, according to Alan Karcher, author of “New Jersey’s Multiple Municipal Madness.” From its earliest days, New Jersey was rife with bitter town vs. town secession battles.
The modern municipal map was created largely by a series of 1890s laws offering tax incentives to communities that split. Naturally, townships across the state began dividing, eventually into neighborhood-sized boroughs complete with their own independent governments. The result today is an increasingly dense, contiguous urban region divided by arbitrary borders into an absurd quilt of minute cities and towns.
Guttenburg, for one example, was set up as a haven for German migrants. The independent strip of land on the Hudson is just three blocks wide. Teterboro, a few miles west, has a government of 31 officials serving its population of just 69 people.
Orange, one of America’s oldest commuter towns, is a less extreme example. At 2.2 square miles, the city is roughly Harlem-sized. Established in 1860 after itself seceding from Newark, the city almost immediately fell apart. South Orange, East Orange and West Orange all seceded from plain-old Orange within three years of its founding. The details are murky and shadowed by local legend, but Karcher called the break-up “as nasty a divorce as any witnessed in the matrimonial courts.” Today, all three of the other Oranges are wealthier than the City of Orange they left behind.
New Jersey’s fractured political landscape forms an interior part of the New York metro region, according to urban studies professor Dennis Gale, who wrote “Greater New Jersey: Living in Gotham’s Shadow.” When viewing North Jersey as a part of a larger whole, the differences in the geography of government are stark. The state’s roughly 9 million people are separated into 564 tiny municipalities. New York holds 8.5 million people in just one.
Naturally, many resources flow toward the center of the metropolitan region, including lawyers, activists, and media focus. Artificially though, the borders of North Jersey push many of those resources out across the Hudson.
The localist paradise in Jersey has its appeal. Theoretically, Gale explains, government should be closer, easier to influence in New Jersey. The clearest drawback is in redundant services and the high taxes that pay for them. With municipalities less than 15% the size of the national average, he argues that the “balkanization” of North Jersey contributes to extreme economic segregation and its greasy-palmed corruption, ubiquitous enough that it’s ensconced in cliche.
But even the supposed pros might actually be cons. Gale argued the small size of governments can actually make them less responsive, saying it provides a “modus operandi for advancing the compartmentalization of small group interests.” The powerful and exploitative, pursued by the watchdogs and spotlights of New York, find shelter in New Jersey.
The odd borders also contributed to white flight and urban disinvestment through the 20th century. For New Yorkers, there was always somewhere “nicer,” richer, more expensive within the City’s boundaries to which the upper middle class could move — keeping their tax revenues within the municipality. Across the river, white flight in the municipal mosaic of North Jersey hollowed out entire cities, without many rich neighborhoods in Newark or Orange to retain wealth in the wake of increasing economic segregation. Leaving towns like Orange behind with a simple move down the road, white Jerseyans could take their wealth with them in a way New Yorkers did not.
Then, gentrification and high prices of New York spread rapidly into New Jersey in the 1990s and 2000s, regional scholar Judith Martin explained. That’s when developers and those pushing for “urban renewal” began taking an interest in the Garden State. Today, a new “luxury” condominium is even taking shape next to the Vose apartments.
The closeness of the area’s cities can lead them to compete with one another to attract development and tax base. With Orange’s former city administrator facing 118 years in prison for an urban renewal kickback scheme, suspicion of the city’s interactions with landowners and developers runs deep.
A federal investigation into Orange’s finances led the FBI to raid city hall, and eventually, Mayor Dwayne Warren’s city administrator was slapped with a litany of corruption charges. In 2021, he was indicted on 31 counts of fraud-related charges. Warren himself survived a petition for a recall, which did not receive enough signatures from Orange voters.
With local media dominated by New York’s interests, scandal works differently in cities like Orange. While New York has a long history of corruption, it also has a robust system of watchdogs and good government groups. An investigation into the Adams administration makes national headlines. The investigation in Orange was niche, hyperlocal news.
Traveling by New Jersey Transit from South Orange to Orange the upper-middle-class town’s Tudor-style houses and manicured lawns abruptly give way to cracked parking lots for Orange’s apartment blocks. Houses between the hulking brick towers look cared for, though the odd light industrial shop or grimy garage dot the landscape — a zoning mix unthinkable just blocks to the south.
787 and 765 Vose Avenue are home to dozens of workers and migrants paying rent to the buildings’ secretive owner. Maggie is no longer one of them — she was evicted and left unsheltered along with her five kids.
Vose also had been my home, as the rent — much lower in Orange than by our South Orange school — was too much for my college roommates and I to pass on.
It was through Vose that I first met Campbell. My moldy apartment ceiling had collapsed in a clear violation of health and safety laws. After failing to get help from the city, watching a state inspector come and go, and even trying to find a lawyer (I failed: I couldn’t afford one), I got desperate.
I used my rudimentary graphic design skills to make a vaguely militaristic logo for “Vose Tenants Union,” and I set to work taping protest signs throughout the building, intending to make it seem like the group had extensive, growing membership willing to fight back on our poor conditions. In reality, it had three members: myself and my roommates.
Campbell, who lived around the corner, found my social media account and got to work, trying to make my ersatz tenant’s association real. She quickly created yet another of her advocacy group chats. It was simply called “765 Vose,” and in addition to my roommates it included four of our neighbors — that’s four more neighbors than I was ever able to organize. The most active poster was Campbell, who sent links to a housing law seminar at a local court, articles about tenants who had sued their landlords, and Zoom information about City Council meetings. Little changed, and my roommates and I eventually moved. The “revolving door” of tenants passing through, scared of retaliation from the slumlord, is part of the problem, Campbell said.
One morning, a few weeks after the election (where India Williams lost her school board race by a narrow margin,) I headed a block west of my old apartment, to Metcalf Park, joining Campbell for a monthly cleanup that she organizes there. The small neighborhood recreation space featured baseball diamonds, basketball courts, and an active community group: Friends of Metcalf Park, which Campbell founded. The Friends have a robust social media presence and its meetings are where Campbell connects many with her advocacy group chats. They clean up the park, and some members become more involved from there.
This was the last cleanup of the year, and over a dozen locals, Black, white, young and old, showed up to pick litter out of the park’s scraggly shrubs. Many of them were cleanup regulars. They welcomed me, initially suspecting I was a new member.
A resident named Rich said he met Campbell through a Facebook post, which led him to the cleanups. Carrying with him a little dog that had no teeth and thus had a perpetually dangling tongue, he said he cleans the park for his two kids. Originally from Holland, the 50-year-old artist moved to New York City years ago. He said coming to New York was like meeting the source of what he loved. Hip Hop, graffiti-style art, everything.
He moved to Orange in the hopes of providing more space for his children but said the tax burden was striking. Essex, Orange’s county, is about the size of Queens, yet it has 21 municipalities, each funding its own police, fire departments and schools. Rich echoed the concerns of many urban scholars, calling the services “redundant.”
Karen, an older volunteer, was excited to have someone to share her gripes with.
“I’m done with the City Council,” she said full-throatedly, first to me, then to nobody in particular. The taxes were too high, the city was too corrupt, and nobody was doing enough about it. Her flow uninterrupted, the diatribe continued for several minutes. She began hatching a plan to put large signs up on her front lawn, saying her camera would catch anyone who dared take her posters away. It was unclear exactly what issue Karen wanted to protest with the signs, but Campbell nodded along with earnest enthusiasm. “I like that idea,” she said.
Cleaning the park led the group into the east branch of the Rahway River, though the title of “river” was generous. The overbuilt trickle of water was littered with debris, likely from previous floods. As the cleanup drew to a close, Campbell gathered the volunteers for a selfie, which the group insisted I join.
Campbell then began gathering the few high school students in the group to sign community service forms. Campbell and Karen chatted with the students about their college plans — if they were going to college. Campbell encouraged them to look into trade schools as well.
Their papers signed, the teens drifted away. Many of the adults stayed back to chat.
New Jersey’s organizers, Campbell among them, are prisoners of the state’s bizarre geography. Not only is it unnaturally divided, but its infrastructure and the flow of people and goods is oriented around Manhattan — with real social effects. Many suggest that bedroom communities, including larger Jerseyan cities that serve as de facto extensions of Gotham, lack positive senses of identity.
“For many North Jerseyans, Manhattan is the only true downtown, the supreme focus of civic and cultural life,” Gale wrote, adding that many in the region maintain a “dual citizenship” mentality. They consider themselves New Yorkers in some contexts, New Jerseyans in others. (Similar dynamics exist in South Jersey, much of which is culturally dominated by Philadelphia, across the Delaware River.) Life in New York’s shadow leaves North Jerseyans less attached to their state, their cities, and arguably, by extension, their neighbors. Apathy ensues and pundits struggle to explain low turnout in one gubernatorial election after another.
Divided under numerous legal jurisdictions and with a cultural and social center located outside the state’s boundaries, organizing on a large scale becomes a challenge. While New Yorkers facing problems can find a rich tapestry of non-profit advocacy groups and can get the attention of those at the center of English-language media, New Jerseyans find red tape and apathetic neighbors.
Efforts to merge small cities and towns have met with limited success over the past decades. Karcher remarked in his book, which pushed for consolidation in the 1990s, that the patchwork of cities and towns is clearly absurd, though changes to the status quo have been minor. “Given the opportunity to redraw the political boundaries of the region, no one would ever break the state into the same irrational, wasteful, counterproductive patterns that presently exist,” he wrote.
While there has been some success in removing municipal redundancies (the Borough of Princeton and the Township of Princeton, nestled awkwardly into each other for over a century, merged in 2013 after decades of debate), interest remains limited among government officials. However, there have been small steps taken to mitigate the ills of hyperlocal government in the Oranges. South Orange recently merged its fire department with nearby Maplewood’s, over the protests of area unions.
Some organizers recognize how this strange state of affairs impacts their ability to get things done. Molly Kaufman is a founding director of University of Orange, an advocacy group in the city that focuses on urban design and the arts. Kaufman comes from a long line of Orange organizers dating back to school desegregation. Offering a more academic, slightly highbrow approach to community activism, Kaufman’s “university” teaches urban development practices.
Kaufman met Campbell shortly after her move to Orange, when she began attending University of Orange events. The pair even co-organized a “meet your neighbors” community potluck in Metcalf Park in 2022 and share similar views on how New Jersey’s boundaries challenge organizers. Kaufman said the multiplicity of New Jersey’s municipalities limits locals from thinking regionally. “Orange can be siloed,” she said, adding that a history of urban issues like redlining and the construction of I-280 led to “physical and social fracture.”
Organizing around housing issues like Maggie’s can be especially complex in the Garden State. Alaina Thomas is a practitioner in residence at Rutgers University’s law clinic, where she works with tenants to overcome housing troubles. Often, that means leading them through a labyrinthine process that requires a landlord to sue a tenant before tenants have any right to sue for uninhabitable conditions. It’s a grueling, expensive, off-putting process.
Despite all the reasons to avoid suing a landlord, the state’s landlord/tenant courts are severely backlogged. Before a monthslong pandemic shutdown, Essex County’s court had to deal with roughly 200 housing cases per day. Now, the courts are so deeply backed up that the state has an online portal mapping the problem.
The slow nature of the courts means that tenants need to band together, Thomas said. That’s often the quickest way for a Jerseyan to solve an imminent housing problem (like, for example, a collapsing ceiling.) But for that to happen successfully, they need to be lucky enough to have a natural-born advocate living in the community.
“There are some people that realize that they have a knack for doing this because conditions have pushed them to advocate for themselves,” Thomas said.
With all its divisions, New Jersey is not set up to breed activists. Surrounded by ineffective governments, apathetic voters and very few news cameras, that’s precisely where the burden of getting things done falls.
Asked whether she calls herself an activist, organizer, or just an involved citizen, Campbell said it was all the same. “Activate, organize,” she said. “I don’t care, do something!”
Campbell’s neighborhood organizing has had mixed success in Orange. While she’s helped build a robust park cleanup, her work to inspire tenants has been met with some apathy and fear of retaliation. To her and other organizers in Orange, the group chats and participation they’ve managed to inspire is their victory.
Veronica Scott used to vote only in national elections and rarely attended community meetings. When Campbell moved into the house next door, Scott found herself falling into community advocacy and joined Friends of Metcalf. Now an active member of their neighborhood’s group chat, the South Ward Alliance, she said Campbell’s work had opened her eyes to the opportunities for local involvement — and she’s not alone.
“I think that the chats have had a tremendous impact,” she said “It was amazing because we were able to share information with people who did not know what was going on in the community.” That communication, she said, has boosted turnout at local meetings and helped empower Orange residents.
A scan through the City Council’s meeting minutes shows a change over time. In 2021, few community members attended meetings to voice their concerns. By 2023, council meetings averaged seven public commenters. “People are being very vocal, and I think it’s making a significant change,” Scott said of the group chats’ impact.
Campbell and Maggie often appeared on the lists of citizen commenters this year. In her several recent appearances before the Council, Maggie urged city officials to do something about 765 Vose, which is structurally unsound and infested with roaches.
I last saw Campbell active at a virtual Orange City Council meeting. Two days before Thanksgiving, the Council pushed ahead with the agenda and finished their work in just over an hour. Eager to get through the agenda, they briefly discussed a 23-year tax exemption for a private “urban renewal” LLC eyeing a property just blocks from Vose Apartments and Metcalf Park.
Over a dozen residents tuned into the meeting. Campbell raised concerns about the development. Perhaps coasting to the holiday, the council moved on without much discussion.
In one of our final conversations, Campbell strongly suggested that, instead of writing about her, I focus on Maggie’s story, lauding her vulnerability in sharing her housing situation before the Council. Eventually though, Maggie, still in search of a home as of Thanksgiving, stopped answering my requests to chat.
Campbell is now hunting down the name of the landlord who evicted Maggie. In my months of searching for the owner of Vose apartments a year earlier, I struggled to find any reliable information that could help me contact the landlord. After Campbell saw some of Maggie’s documentation from the apartment, she said she had a lead to follow.
At the end of the November City Council meeting, concerned Orange residents, Campbell and Rich among them, turned off their computers.
Physically apart from each other, the isolated community began turning their thoughts away from taxes and land use and toward the holiday. But perhaps a few turned to a group chat to vent their concerns.
Campbell said some locals ask her why she feels the need to organize in a community she’s not from.
“For me, it don’t matter where you’re at,” she said. “If this is your mindset, wherever you rest your head you’re gonna be doing it. You’re gonna be doing some aspect of this work, ’cause it’s just ingrained in you.”
