Immigrants have helped transform Los Angeles from a defense-dependent trade backwater into the nation's largest trading center. A prime example of that phenomenon -- and of the advantageous international connections immigrants bring to the table -- is Charlie Woo, who fathered a whole new industry in the city.
When Woo first came to Southern California from Hong Kong, in 1968, he had plans to become a physicist. But shortly before he finished his Ph.D., his family asked him to help set up a business importing toys from Hong Kong to Los Angeles. Woo discovered a largely deserted old district east of downtown L.A. that once had housed small factories and warehouses. "No one wanted to be here," he recalls. "It was totally dead."
Unperturbed, Woo set up his own toy-distribution business there. Using his Asian connections, he procured large volumes of toys. Anglo distributors claimed they needed a 50% to 100% margin on their toys. Woo, taking advantage of his low-cost location, found he was making a nice profit with a 15% to 25% cushion.
As his business grew Woo invited other distributors to join him. Today Woo's MegaToys has plenty of company. More than 500 toy distributors have located in or near the area now known as Toytown. Like Woo, most of the proprietors of Toytown businesses are immigrants -- Vietnamese, Chinese, Latino, and Korean. So, too, are most of the customers in the district, which now employs some 6,000 workers and has revenues estimated as high as $1 billion.
On weekdays, and particularly on weekends, Toytown is crammed with shoppers, including representatives from toy stores as far away as Argentina. They come not only for bargains, Woo suggests, but also for the design skills, packaging, and intelligence about toy trends that the Toytown entrepreneurs provide.
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Back-to-the-Future Cities
The challenge for cities of the future will be to seek out ways to nurture the growth of a new economy based on smaller, more specialized, and more flexible enterprises and not on traditional corporate giants. Ultimately, that may mean rethinking long-established planning and development mind-sets, which have traditionally fixated on huge office complexes -- the prototypical symbol of the city of the industrial age.
It's likely no happenstance that the new creative industries in San Francisco are not in the financial district but in the somewhat seedier, low-rise districts south of Market. And in Los Angeles, whose greatest blessing may well be the relative unimportance of its struggling downtown, the new digital industries are concentrated in the more villagelike atmosphere of the Marina, Venice, Santa Monica, and Burbank.
That emerging pattern can be seen even in New York, where multimedia businesses and high-end business-service companies like Dutka's Audits & Surveys now congregate in airy, lower-rise districts such as Chelsea, Tribeca, and Soho. It's there -- among the remnants of an older New York -- that the future of Gotham is likely to be spawned.
Indeed, like early-19th-century New York, the future city will rely not on its bulk or on hegemonic control of industry but on its skills as a trading and commercial center. Even as both the conventional blue-collar worker and the middle manager "in the gray flannel suit" become rarer, the city will be reinvented by less-conventional archetypes -- the artist, the computer programmer, and the global-trade expert, as well as the entrepreneur from Taiwan and the craftsperson from Guyana.
That does not imply that the rural Valhallas will not continue to grow. Industries that don't require high skills will continue to migrate to the greener -- and cheaper -- pastures of the hinterland. But when it comes to amassing the information for key corporate decisions, cutting the big deals, and providing the images and sounds for the world marketplace, the cities, so often dismissed as impractical and even pestilential, will remain at the heart of the action.
So, for Sol Dutka, the costs -- like the taxes, the regulation, and the other urban annoyances -- are more than worth it. By staying in the midst of a dynamic urban setting, Dutka believes, his workers are almost forced to become more creative and, in the long run, more productive for his business. "There's a psychic value to lifestyle," Dutka explains. "The whole purpose of a manager is to get the most from people. That's something New York does for you."
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Joel Kotkin (jkotkin@earthlink.net), who is based in Los Angeles, is a senior fellow with the Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy, in Malibu, and the Pacific Research Institute, in San Francisco. Research assistance for this article was provided by Mary Furash.
THE 10 HIGHEST CONCENTRATIONS OF ELECTRONIC COTTAGES
Area % of residents who work at home
Downtown San Diego 9.4%
Midtown Manhattan 7.1%
Downtown Manhattan 7.0%
Century City/Beverly Hills, Calif. 6.4%
Bethesda/Chevy Chase, Md. 6.1%
Austin, Tex. 6.0%
Berkeley, Calif. 5.5%
Greenwich, Conn. 5.5%
Calabasas/101 Freeway, Calif. 5.2%
Santa Monica, Calif. 5.2%
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Source: The Edge City News, the Edge City Group, Broad Run, Va., 1996. n
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