The Manufacturing Exodus
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The proposal of the city’s planning department to alter the zoning regulations in Williamsburg and Greenpoint will enter its final phase in September, a seven-month long review. The plan, meant to foster residential development on the waterfront, will lead to the displacement of manufacturers who are based in the area now, as landlords balk at renewing leases, instead converting their sites to more lucrative residential properties.
Councilman David Yassky, who represents Williamsburg and Greenpoint, has proposed setting up a fund that landlords who convert sites to residential use would pay into — he has suggested $30 a square foot for building owners who make the choice to convert. The money would then go to offer displaced businesses relocation assistance and to fund nonprofit development of manufacturing sites, along the lines of the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center.
Mr. Yassky and supporters point to the long, slow decline of the city’s manufacturing sector, which accounted for 1 million jobs in 1960 and only about 300,000 in 1990. During the recent recession, another 13,000 manufacturing jobs were lost, according to the state’s Department of Labor. They say this fund would help keep good jobs in the city.
Manufacturing jobs are often good jobs, and it would be good to keep more of them here. But our sense of the situation is that the drain on these kinds of jobs has less to do with the absence of funds and subsidies and more to do with the burden of taxation and regulation and controls on wages and working conditions that makes the city less competitive.
City-approved nonprofit industrial centers are problematic in their own right. One Red Hook business owner said he was courted by city officials in 1996 when they said the neighborhood was “blighted.” He spent millions investing in his site.
Now his future is threatened by the neighborhood’s rapid development as a retail and high-end residential hub — and the city officials who were once so interested in bringing him there are indifferent to his straits. They are just tickled pink by how far Red Hook has come.
