Photo: Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images
Upon hearing that the City Council is preparing, once again, to fix New York’s broken system for regulating street vendors, my first thought was, Here we go again. For literally centuries, creating a fair deal for street sellers has been one of those mysterious New York problems that never changes and somehow never gets fixed.
Mayor Eric Adams and the City Council are currently negotiating help for the city’s 23,000 street vendors, most of whom are selling goods without legal permission. Despite New York’s proud history as a commercial center, we have a dishonorable tradition of squeezing, abusing, and punishing the men and women who eke out a living by selling food or merchandise on the sidewalks and subway platforms.
“Street vendors are doing really bad right now, under the current system that has been existing for the last half a century. They don’t have a legal pathway to access business licensing, which is square one for any small business in the city,” Mohamed Attia, managing director of the Street Vendor Project, told me. “What this administration is offering is crackdowns over and over again. We’re seeing the sanitation police going after our vendors. We’re seeing the NYPD getting involved and issuing more tickets than ever before.”
Legally selling goods or food on New York streets requires navigating a formidable obstacle course. Until recently, the number of vendor permits was fixed at an absurdly low 853, a number set in 1979. The result is an impossibly long wait list, a thriving black market in permits, and a situation in which three-quarters of the city’s estimated 20,500 mobile food vendors — 96 percent of whom are immigrants — are operating without permits, according to the Immigration Research Initiative think tank.
That makes them big, visible targets for the multiple agencies that regulate street vendors: The Department of Sanitation nominally has lead regulatory responsibility, but the Department of Health licenses food vendors (with input from the FDNY when cooking is involved), and an entirely different set of rules and licenses are designated for veterans.
As usual when New York isn’t sure who should fix a complicated problem on the streets, we’ve turned it over to the cops. “More than 9,000 tickets were issued by the NYPD to street vendors last year in 2024,” says Attia. That’s more than twice the number issued in 2023, and Attia says “more than 2,000 of them are criminal tickets,” creating legal headaches for the vendors.
The City Council tried to bring vendors out of the shadows in 2021 by passing a law that requires 445 new permits be issued every year for a decade, but implementation has been spotty. “What we’ve learned is that the Health Department is issuing the supervisory application approval, but they’re not mandating that you hand it in back in time to become a licensed vendor,” Amanda Farías, who chairs the Council’s Committee on Economic Development, told me. “What we’re seeing year after year is that they’re not meeting the mandatory 445. And so realistically, in the ten-year time period, we’re never going to make it to over 4,000 people.”
Farías is pushing a package of bills that would speed up licensing, expand outreach and education to vendors, and centralize regulation in the hands of the Department of Small Business Services. “We want to make sure that we’re setting up a legal framework where people are able to actually legally vend with a proper license, but also make sure there’s supportive services to answer for the problems that we know are happening throughout communities,” she says.
It sounds like a promising start on a problem that has defied solution for more than 300 years. As far back as 1707, decades before the United States came into existence, vendors were banned from selling on the streets of New Amsterdam, opposed by traditional storefront merchants who didn’t want competition. A political compromise called the Thirty Minute Law barred peddlers from setting up in a single location but gave rise to the famous pushcarts that enabled vendors and their goods to move along — sometimes only a few feet — every half-hour. Street hawking gradually returned in the course of the next 200 years, even while New York, exploding in population, was pioneering new forms of retail, such as indoor arcades and department stores. Finally, in the 1800s, a handful of vendors defiantly lined up their carts and decided to stay put, creating permanent (and illegal) outdoor markets on the Lower East Side.
In 1906, enough vending had returned that Mayor George McClellan ordered a crackdown that was opposed by the East Side Push Cart Peddlers’ Association, which numbered in the thousands. “The members of our Association are a poor and miserable lot, and if you will not grant us our little privileges in order to make a living for ourselves and our families, you will drive us to desperation,” the group told City Hall in language that would be appropriate today. “Please give this your immediate attention, as otherwise we will be compelled to march ourselves, our wives, and little children down to the City Hall, and will wave black banners to show to this metropolis how its poor are treated by the mayor of the city.”
McClellan created a blue-ribbon commission that issued one of the many reports on the plight of vendors that New York has generated over the years. Different mayors recommended confining vendors to areas beneath the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges; Fiorello La Guardia, who despised the spectacle of Italian hurdy-gurdy performers, tried to ban street vending altogether in the 1930s. He even took on the innovative Good Humor company, which in 1938 had 92 cars and hundreds of bicycles crisscrossing New York selling ice cream.
“If I can get cooperation from the City Council, I’m going to abolish all itinerant peddling from the streets … This whole thing of pushcarts has been abused,” La Guardia said. “Good Humor will simply have to adjust itself to doing business under the conditions demanded by a city of 7 million people; that’s all there is to it.”
But there’s always more to it. And it’s long past time New York to give these immigrant entrepreneurs a square, fair deal.
