Harkham, who has worked in the fashion industry for 35 years, believes that if this situation continues, the once-thriving garment district will eventually lose its primacy as the center of the West Coast rag trade.
But it's more than the garment industry that needs attention from City Hall. The city's small-business sector, which remains the best hope for L.A.'s economic recovery, remains burdened by what many entrepreneurs claim is an onerous regulatory regime that favors the well-connected and big financial interests. "It's extremely difficult to do business in Los Angeles," Eastside retail developer Jose de Jesus Legaspi said. "The regulations are difficult to manage. ... Everyone has to kiss the rings of the [City Hall politicians]."
Yet despite the problems, businesspeople like Legaspi and Metchek believe that Los Angeles can find a way to restart its economy after the real estate bubble. After all, the city and region still possess many of the assets -- concentrations of design genius in entertainment and fashion, a pool of skilled industrial workers and strong ties to the rapidly growing Pacific Rim economies -- that drove recovery in the mid- and late-1990s.
And there remains the considerable energy of the city's immigrant community, which constitutes roughly half of L.A.'s total workforce, according to a recent study by the Migration Policy Institute. Between 1997 and 2007, according to statistics compiled by Praxis Strategy Group, a consulting firm with which I work, the number of Latino- and Asian-owned businesses grew far more rapidly -- nearly 40% among Latinos and more than 22% among Asians, compared with 15% overall -- than those of other ethnic groups. Today, foreign-born Angelenos are twice as likely to be self-employed than their native-born counterparts.
Los Angeles needs to tap the entrepreneurial spirit of these immigrants to grow economically. But that means scaling back its infatuation with high-profile real estate development in favor of the mundane business of enhancing employment opportunities through training workers, reducing regulatory burdens and fostering more cooperation among our still-diverse industrial base. That's not a politically sexy choice for the mayor, but it remains the best way to restore L.A.'s tarnished status as a city of opportunity.
