Tenancy and Space Utilization

In 2002, the Fashion Center BID contracted with Identity Map to conduct a door-to-door survey of the properties in the district. According to the survey, the Fashion Center BID contains 380 separate commercial and industrial buildings with approximately 32 million square feet of space. This count includes those buildings that are either occupied by or available to commercial business and non-profit tenants but excludes government buildings, residential properties and other non-commercial uses and instead. This survey identified 8,339 separate units and found a vacancy rate of approximately 13.4 percent. Uses in the occupied units were broken down among warehouse, manufacturing, showroom, retail, design, office and other uses - or in many cases, some combination thereof.

There are 6,595 tenants in the BID area occupying 27.0 million SF of space (an average of 4,096 SF per tenant). These tenants are engaged in businesses that span numerous industries, including those shown in Table 3 below, which have the highest representation in the BID neighborhood. Despite years of decline in employment and tenancy, the fashion industry still dominates the district in terms of the number of tenants and space utilized.

Table 3 - Breakdown of Fashion Center BID Tenants (by Industry)

Chart 3
Industry Breakdown of Non-Fashion Tenants in the Fashion Center BID

Fashion-related industries, including apparel, textiles/fabrics, accessories/jewelry, and buttons/trimming, account for 4,245 tenants (64 percent of the total) as compared to 2,248 tenants (34 percent) in non-fashion industries. As the employment data suggested, no single industry dominates among non-fashion tenants, and instead there is a rich variety of non-fashion businesses located in the BID. The tenant distribution is depicted in Table 3 and Chart 3.

In terms of space, once again fashion-related uses account for the largest share of occupied space in the BID, covering 17,630,717 SF of space or about 55 percent of the total space (and 65 percent of the occupied space). The Identity Map survey attempted to categorize the functions these fashion-related tenants conducted in their space (see Chart 4 below). Non-Fashion uses account for 9,382,547 SF, about 29 percent of the total space in the BID (and 35 percent of the occupied space).

Chart 4
Space Distribution Among Fashion Related Uses in the Fashion Center

Within the 17.6 million SF of space occupied by fashion-related tenants, the greatest proportion, some 5.0 million SF, is occupied by showroom uses. Approximately 2.5 million SF is utilized by office-based fashion tenants, while 2.4 million SF are occupied by firms engaged solely in the manufacturing of apparel and other fashion-related goods. In addition, almost equal shares of space are utilized exclusively for either design (674,625 SF) or warehousing uses (603,207 SF). While these breakdowns are illustrative of how space is divided among fashion uses in the district, it is important to note that a large portion of the space occupied by fashion-related uses – some 6.4 million SF of space – is attributable to firms engaged in a mix of these uses. In particular, combinations of showroom and design, warehouse and showroom, and design and office account for a significant amount of space in this neighborhood.

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