Camden, quietly winning.

Shipyard county becomes commuter county.

Camden County was carved out of Gloucester County in 1844, named for the Earl of Camden, and built on the back of one of the largest industrial waterfronts on the East Coast — RCA Victor, Campbell's Soup, the New York Shipbuilding Corporation. For a century, the city of Camden was where America's Navy was assembled.

The post-war collapse of Camden City's industrial base is well-documented and was severe. What's less appreciated is what happened in parallel: the suburban townships east and south of the city quietly built one of the densest, most diverse, most school-anchored suburban belts in the Mid-Atlantic. Cherry Hill grew from a country club and a few farms in 1950 into a 70,000-person regional retail and residential hub by 1980. Haddonfield, a Quaker meeting house town established in 1713, kept its historic Main Street largely intact through every wave of suburbanization that followed.

The PATCO Speedline, opened in 1969, did for Camden County what the Walt Whitman Bridge did for Gloucester — collapsed the commute time into Center City Philadelphia to under twenty-five minutes from any of five South Jersey stations. That single piece of infrastructure is why Cherry Hill, Haddonfield, Collingswood, and Westmont remain among the most reliably-appreciating residential markets in New Jersey.

The 12.7% surprise.

In early 2026, Camden County posted +12.7% YoY median price appreciation — among the highest in the Mid-Atlantic. The drivers are not mysterious: the same fundamentals that made the suburban belt strong for fifty years (PATCO access, top public schools in Cherry Hill / Haddonfield / Voorhees, walkable downtowns in Haddonfield and Collingswood) finally compounded with cross-bridge demand from PA buyers priced out of Chester County and Lower Bucks. Cherry Hill is now the volume engine, Haddonfield the prestige play, and Audubon and Collingswood the gentrification edges where investors chase yield.

Camden City itself is finally seeing meaningful institutional reinvestment — Subaru of America's North American HQ moved into a new tower on the waterfront in 2018, Rutgers-Camden has expanded the medical school, Cooper University Health continues to be the region's largest non-government employer. None of this has yet translated into a residential rebound for the city itself, but the suburban ring continues to benefit from the regional gravity.