Buying Land in Camden County, New Jersey

Two different land markets inside one county

Camden County is genuinely split between two very different land-buying realities, and this page treats that honestly rather than picking one framing for the whole county. Camden city itself -- the county seat, and one of New Jersey's most economically distressed municipalities -- has a substantial amount of vacant and city-owned land, but the realistic way to acquire it isn't a conventional purchase of raw acreage; it runs through the Camden Redevelopment Agency and New Jersey's 2019 Land Bank Law, which together give the city real tax-foreclosure and land-assembly tools most conventional sellers don't have.

Outside the city, Camden County's other 36 municipalities range from established inner-ring suburbs (Cherry Hill, Collingswood, Haddonfield) to more open, semi-rural townships toward the county's southern and eastern edges (Winslow, Waterford, Voorhees), some of which sit partly inside the mapped Pinelands Area. Zoning is set independently by each of the county's 37 municipalities under the Municipal Land Use Law; the county government itself does not zone land.

The Pinelands Area: 38% of the county, mostly in the southeast

Camden is one of the seven counties touched by the 1979 Pinelands Protection Act's mapped Pinelands Area, with 54,907 acres -- 38% of the county's total land area -- inside the boundary, concentrated almost entirely in Winslow Township in the county's southeast. That's a meaningfully smaller share than neighboring Atlantic (63%) or Burlington (64%) counties, but it's still substantial: within the mapped area, the Pinelands Commission's Comprehensive Management Plan and Land Capability Map set minimum lot sizes and use restrictions -- Winslow's own zoning carries specific Rural Development and Forest Area districts with different minimum lot sizes -- that can run well above what a similar-looking lot elsewhere in the county would face. Wharton State Forest, New Jersey's largest single state park tract at roughly 122,880 acres, also extends into Camden County alongside its larger Burlington and Atlantic County portions. A buyer looking at land in Winslow or a similar southeastern township should confirm a parcel's specific Pinelands zone designation directly with the Pinelands Commission -- not assume standard suburban zoning applies just because the surrounding area looks residential.

County government and septic administration

Camden County runs the standard NJ commissioner-only structure -- a Board of County Commissioners that elects its own Director from among its members, rather than a separately elected County Executive (the model used only in Atlantic, Bergen, Essex, Hudson, and Mercer). As everywhere in the state, the board's name changed from "Board of Chosen Freeholders" to "Board of County Commissioners" under the 2020 law effective January 2021.

Septic permitting runs through a single county office: the Camden County Department of Health and Human Services' Water Quality Unit, within its Division of Environmental and Consumer Health, handles ISSDS permits for new construction, alterations, malfunctioning-system repairs, and deviations from the statewide N.J.A.C. 7:9A standard. Given how sewered Camden city and its inner suburbs are, this office's work is realistically concentrated in the county's outer, less-developed townships.