SNJ Business People

Camden County College’s Center for Civic Leadership and Responsibility presented its 2010 Civic Leadership Award to James J. Florio, who has spent his life serving the people of New Jersey – most notably as the Garden State’s 49th governor following multiple terms as a member of the United States House of Representatives.

  Since we like to bring together panels of experts in their fields, we asked a half dozen of the region’s top commercial and industrial real estate gurus to share their thinking on a couple of subjects that we’ve been pondering.
  We asked them, among other things, to help us gauge the regional market, as well as the existence (or not) of a commercial real estate “bubble,” where new tenants are coming from, their predictions on new “hot spots,” the impact of the PATCO extension into Gloucester County, and the market for investor-owned properties here.

  As you know, this year, your favorite regional business publication has been profiling South Jersey’s “People to Watch” for the past two years.
  Now we’ve turned our attention from “people” to “projects.” Specifically, we’re going county-by-county and looking at the development and redevelopment Projects to Watch, including (when we can) the most important projects completed in the last 12 months,  the most important projects underway, and the most important projects on the drawing board.
  We started with Burlington County, then took a break to look at what’s been going on at the Delaware River Port Authority (DRPA). Then we moved on to Camden and Cumberland and now it’s Ocean County’s turn.

  This month we continue to look at some key metrics that create a snapshot of the regional economy.
  We’re adding a few barometers each month, so that we’ll end up with a pretty comprehensive picture of what’s happening in the region by year’s end.
  In January, we started with the basics, population, square miles, median household income and unemployment rate. In February, we removed media household income (it’s an annual number) and updated the unemployment numbers (every South Jersey county was up…the state was up…and the country was flat).

  Meeting the regional demands for tomorrow’s workforce may be a long and hard row to hoe if Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Education doesn’t start to measure up soon.
  That was the verdict from more than a dozen experts who participated in a day-long look at innovations in workforce development on February 19th at Virtua Memorial Hospital in Mt. Holly.
  The event was presented by SMART, a four-state coalition that works to enhance the competitive position of New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware within the US Congress and around the world.