This op-ed began with a question.
In a recent exchange, an acquaintance mentioned Mayor Arthur J. Holland while reflecting on Trenton’s current challenges. That brief reference prompted me to step back and examine historical benchmarks, poverty trends, population shifts, and economic changes, during Mayor Holland’s second tenure, from 1970 to 1989.
What the research revealed was not the failure of a single administration, but a deeper and more enduring truth: Trenton’s modern challenges are rooted in structural economic changes that were never fully confronted or corrected. Manufacturing left. Family-sustaining jobs disappeared. White flight accelerated. Poverty rose steadily, from the low-teens in 1970 to roughly 18 percent by the end of the 1980s. Today, Trenton’s poverty rate exceeds 25 percent, making clear that the problem was never solved, only managed and allowed to compound across generations.
As these conditions persisted, middle-class Black families also began leaving Trenton, a reality often overlooked in public discourse. Their departure was not abandonment; it was rational decision-making in response to shrinking opportunity, declining services, and limited economic mobility. When both white and Black middle-class families leave a city, it is not a cultural failure. It is a systems failure.
Once these forces took hold, Trenton shifted, almost unconsciously, from eliminating poverty to managing it.
That shift still defines the city today.
Anyone considering a run for Mayor or City Council should begin with an honest question:
Are you prepared to solve poverty, or only to manage it?
During the 1970s and 1980s, factories closed and industrial employers departed, dismantling the economic foundation that had supported working- and middle-class families, Black and white alike. The loss was not merely jobs, but wages, stability, and upward mobility. What followed was a slow but steady transformation of poverty from a condition to be reversed into a permanent feature to be administered.
Programs multiplied. Services expanded. Entire systems grew around treating symptoms rather than addressing causes.
Managing poverty became the work.
Eliminating poverty quietly disappeared as the goal.
This is not an indictment of compassion.
It is an indictment of strategy.
Good intentions are not the same as effective governance. A city can be busy, funded, and well-meaning, and still fail its people if it never rebuilds pathways to economic stability, ownership, and opportunity.
Future candidates must understand this fundamental truth:
Poverty is not a social services problem. It is an economic systems problem.
If elected, you will inherit fragile finances, aging infrastructure, and residents who have heard promises of change for decades. The temptation will be to manage decline more efficiently, to secure more aid, launch more initiatives, and declare progress based on activity rather than outcomes.
That approach has already been tried.
Repeatedly.
It has not worked.
Real leadership requires rebuilding an economic engine capable of producing family-sustaining wages, supporting small businesses, expanding homeownership, and creating clear workforce-to-career pipelines. It requires operational excellence, disciplined governance, and accountability measured by results, not rhetoric.
City Council candidates must also be clear about their role. Governance is not political theater. It is oversight, budgeting, and the courage to ask hard questions when strategies are vague or when budgets fund the management of poverty without any credible plan to reduce it.
Managing poverty through the budget without challenging its persistence is not stewardship—it is surrender.
In A City Worth Fighting For, I argue that Trenton’s future depends on shifting from reactive governance to intentional, systems-based transformation, where success is measured not by how many programs exist, but by how many people no longer need them.
Trenton does not lack resilience.
It lacks structural change.
The next administration, Mayor and Council alike, must decide whether it will continue managing the consequences of decisions made decades ago, or finally confront their root causes with courage, competence, and clarity.
Poverty is not inevitable.
But eliminating it requires leadership willing to think differently, govern rigorously, and rebuild the middle class that once anchored this city.
That is the work.
And it is long overdue.