Annals of capitalism...

On why we need a garment district in Manhattan (or a clothes making district) and elsewhere...

It’s fair to ask why we still need a garment district. But even in the Internet era, proximity offers many advantages. Designers are able to work alongside manufacturers. We can stop by factories to inspect garments, change the fit or correct the sewing. Manufacturing locally, as opposed to overseas, allows us to quickly increase or decrease production, depending on what customers want, and is the only affordable option for young designers with limited resources working on a small scale. More important, in close quarters a mutual respect develops across the chain of production. The people who make the clothes are as passionate as the designers. Both vision and execution benefit from this relationship, and that’s why we do 85 percent of our manufacturing within five blocks of our 35th Street office.

The city once recognized these benefits, and that’s why it passed a zoning law limiting the conversion of the area’s factory space to offices in 1987, in an effort to keep garment makers from being priced out (something that had been going on since the district’s mid-century heyday.) But the city stopped enforcing the law in 1993, and although the Bloomberg administration devoted some new funds to enforcement in 2005, it simultaneously weakened the zoning restrictions. It’s easy to see that many landlords still get away with breaking the rules, and we’ve heard of only one landlord ever getting prosecuted. So floor by floor over the years, manufacturing space has been quietly diverted to other uses, and manufacturing jobs have moved overseas. The city’s proposed exchange offers garment manufacturers 280,000 square feet in exchange for freeing the rest of the district from the zoning restrictions, but this is far less space than is needed. Currently apparel manufacturing occupies 16 percent of the area, or more than a million square feet.