ABSTRACT
“They’re a culture living in the past,” one regulator argued when asked why their efforts at environmental code enforcement had largely failed among the jewelry manufacturers operating within the downtown of a major metropolitan US city. It was a tough point of departure for a project that spanned nearly 3,300 businesses, 10,000 workers, and nine regulatory agencies. Our team was participating in a regulatory roundtable to help frame the challenges regulators were facing within an industry that had thrived in downtown with minimal regulatory oversight and under building and operating codes that had not been reviewed for almost 30 years. The regulators’ complaints were many, but most seemed to boil down to a mix of disinterest and dismissiveness among jewelry manufacturers, most of whom were immigrants of Armenian (40%), Persian (25%), and Far Eastern (25%) descent.
