Clayton Gillette Offers Lessons for Remote Work

from the Garment District

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Senior Fellow Clayton Gillette has published “Remote Work and City Decline: Lessons From the Garment District,” in the Journal of Legal Analysis, which was profiled by NYU Law News:

For Gillette, the flowering of the Garment District without government interference was a notable success story. However, he says, “what happened in the last quarter of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century is the intervention of government to try to prevent the decline of an industry. And that was, in my view, at least, a significant failure and probably precluded the entry of what would have been more productive uses of that space.”

As dense urban areas like New York City consider proposals such as subsidizing landlords threatened by office vacancy or aiding a particular declining industry, Gillette urges deliberation—even as he acknowledges he has no easy solutions to offer. “The immediate knee-jerk reaction, which is ‘Let’s prop up what made us productive in the past,’ isn’t going to cut it,” he warns.

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