How to stop an eviction or get back into housing in Camden County, New Jersey
If you've gotten an eviction notice in Camden County, or you've already lost your place and are staying in a motel, your car, or doubled up with someone, there's real help here — and more than one way to use it. You can get a free lawyer to fight the eviction, emergency money to cover rent or utilities you've fallen behind on, and a single phone call that opens the door to the county's rehousing system. This page covers each one: who to call and what they can actually do for you.
If you're not in a crisis yet and just want short term or maybe ongoing help keeping up with rent, our Camden County rental assistance page is the better place to start — this page is for when your housing is already at risk.
A free lawyer to fight the eviction
The most useful thing to know up front is that a notice from your landlord is not the same as being put out on the street. In New Jersey, no landlord can legally change your locks, shut off your heat or water, or haul your belongings outside. Only a court officer — called a Special Civil Part Officer — can carry out an eviction, and only after your landlord takes you to court and a judge rules against you. That process takes time.
You don't have to walk into eviction court alone, and you don't have to pay for it. South Jersey Legal Services (website: https://sjlslaw.org/) has an office right in Camden and represents low-income tenants in eviction cases for free. They can find defenses you may not know you have, deal with your landlord directly, push back on an eviction that wasn't done properly, and buy you time. Reach the Camden office at 856-964-2010.
If you can't get through there, or you're not sure where to start, Legal Services of New Jersey runs a statewide legal aid hotline at 1-888-LSNJ-LAW (1-888-576-5529) on weekdays, where an intake worker checks whether you qualify and sends you to the right place. Legal help is only one of the options on this page, but for a lot of people it's the one that changes how things end in court.
If a program or charity agrees to cover what you owe and your landlord refuses to take it, you can ask the court to step in. And if you just need more time, you can ask the judge for a hardship stay, which can pause an eviction for several months as long as you keep paying rent going forward.
Emergency money to cover what you owe
If the real problem is money that is due — back rent, a utility bill in arrears, a security deposit you can't pull together — Camden County partners with a handful of nonprofits to hand out exactly that kind of help. The county's Office of Homeless Services pools federal, state, and local dollars and runs them through these agencies, so the number you call belongs to one of the nonprofits, not the county.
- Catholic Charities Diocese of Camden is one of the main ones. They help with overdue rent and utilities, emergency housing, and case management to untangle what caused the crisis, and they work in both English and Spanish. Reach them at 856-342-4100.
- The Camden County Council on Economic Opportunity, the county's community action agency, handles similar emergency help at 856-964-6887 — we cover more of what they do on our Council on Economic Opportunity page.
- Senior Citizens United Community Services administers emergency funds and a longer-term rental voucher program, and despite the name they help people well beyond seniors; call 856-456-1121.
- And Volunteers of America Delaware Valley, which runs housing programs across the region, can be reached at 856-854-4660.
A couple of state and county programs are worth asking for by name when you call. New Jersey's Homelessness Prevention Program can pay several months of back rent for a household facing eviction after a temporary setback. Also, if you already receive welfare or General Assistance, the Camden County Board of Social Services has Emergency Assistance for housing crises; if you don't qualify for that, ask about the county's wrap-around help for families who fall into that gap. For broader, ongoing rent help beyond an emergency, our Camden County rental assistance page lays out more.
If you've already lost your housing: one call to get rehoused
If you're past prevention — in a shelter, your car, an abandoned building, or crashing with friends because there's nowhere else — Camden County uses a single process so you don't have to call agency after agency hoping someone has an opening. It's called coordinated entry, and the assessment is run by the Center for Family Services (website: https://www.centerffs.org/counties/camden-county). You call one number, answer questions about your situation, and get placed on a county-wide priority list that dozens of local housing programs pull from.
That number is 833-322-4663, and it covers Camden along with Cape May, Cumberland, and Gloucester counties, which share one regional homeless system. Depending on what you need, that call can lead to rapid rehousing — help with a deposit and a few months of rent to get you into a place of your own — plus shelter and a case manager who stays with you. After your first assessment, check back in regularly so you don't slip off the list.
As another option, if you live in the city of Camden NJ specifically, the city's Senior Services and Emergency Assistance office runs homelessness-prevention help for residents too, and you can reach it at 856-757-7285.
Two official tools that help
Two New Jersey government resources are worth understanding as well. The state's DCAid screening tool lets you answer a short set of questions and see at once which housing, eviction-prevention, and utility programs you may qualify for — a fast way to surface help you didn't know existed. If you've already gotten court papers, the New Jersey Courts self-help page for landlord-tenant cases explains the process in plain language and has every form you might need, free.
Whatever your situation, the thing that helps most is moving early. The lawyer, the emergency funds, and the rehousing line all work better with a little lead time, and they feed into the same county system — so the first call you make is rarely wasted.
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