Can New York City Street Vendors Survive a Police Crackdown?

This is Street Wars, a weekly series on the battle for space on New York’s streets and sidewalks.

Tears filled Blanca Alvarado’s eyes as she described, in Spanish, the events of Aug. 23.

At around 7 p.m., she was cooking and selling tripa mishqui, an Ecuadorean delicacy, on Junction Boulevard in Corona, Queens. Suddenly, she was surrounded by police officers asking for her license and I.D.

She had both, she said, and showed them.

While Alvarado has a street vendor license, she doesn’t have a mobile food permit. A license is for the person making the food and certifies that they’ve taken a food safety course. But a permit, which legalizes the food cart or truck itself, is notoriously hard to get — and there are thousands of people on the waiting list to receive one.

Police officers wrote her several tickets. Then, she said, they said they were going to take her cart and put it on a truck.

She thought her cart would be impounded, or taken to the precinct — so she asked where she could go to pick it up later. But when the truck arrived, she saw it was a garbage truck. Police officers threw Alvarado’s cart into the back.

The city has been cracking down on street vendors this year, with several high-profile incidents.

In April, a group of street vendors protested a flurry of tickets in Brooklyn, claiming they were being unfairly targeted by the police, WPIX reported. One man said he had been fined so often he had lost his home.

In July, police detained a vendor in the Bronx, who then collapsed while in handcuffs and had to be hospitalized, as reported by News12.

And in August, when the police issued tickets and confiscated property in Brooklyn, a 66-year-old man was injured, according to Hell Gate.

This new wave of enforcement follows the decision to ban vendors from the Brooklyn Bridge and last summer’s widespread crackdown on street vendors in Corona Plaza, which The New York Times had called one of the city’s best places to eat.

In Corona, plenty changed about street vending in the months that followed the sweep. Vendors like Alvarado have been selling food several blocks from the plaza, on streets like Junction Boulevard, which on a recent weekday was lined with carts and tables offering everything from tacos to mango slices to toys and gold chains.

Last week, Alvarado joined more than 50 other vendors at a rally and news conference, where they held signs reading “justice for vendors,” “street vending creates local jobs” and “New York City runs on street vendors.”

The police “broke the law” by destroying vendors’ property without due process, said Katy Diaz, who works with the Street Vendor Project. The organization supports vendors and provides legal advice.

“We are not criminals,” Diaz said. “We are mostly women, hardworking women, supporting families.”

In New York, enforcement of street vending regulations falls under the jurisdiction of the Sanitation Department. Reached for comment, the department referred The Times to the Police Department, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Some people argue that the vendors cause crowded sidewalks and criticize their food preparation methods as unsanitary.

“The No. 1 complaint our office receives is about the congestion, garbage and unsafe food handling caused by street vendors, especially those on Roosevelt Avenue,” said Francisco Moya, a City Council member whose district includes his native Corona.

Moya said that he had voted to increase the number of available vending permits, but he “cannot support the sale of unsanitary food, counterfeit goods or stolen merchandise.” He added that since June 1, the Department of Sanitation had issued “well over 100 violations” for cleanliness and other issues, which can include not having a license, selling counterfeit items or not leaving enough room on the sidewalk.

Pierina Sanchez, a City Council member, represents several neighborhoods in the Bronx, where street vendors are also prevalent. She has a different outlook.

“This heavy-handed approach is not a solution to the challenges street vendors face,” she said in a statement, calling the vendors “an integral part of our communities.”

Sanchez has introduced legislation that would reform the food vending system. “It is critical for the city to chart a path forward that supports our smallest businesses in harmony with neighborhoods, instead of repressing them as inconveniences,” she said.

A study published in January by the city’s Independent Budget Office found that if all of the vendors currently waiting for permits received them, the city would net about $17 million in revenue.

Open-air commerce is in the city’s DNA.

“Street vending has been part of New York City history since even before New York was New York,” said Kat Lloyd, the vice president of programs and interpretation at the Tenement Museum in Manhattan, a nonprofit cultural institution focused on the Lower East Side homes of immigrants, migrants and refugees.

In the 1890s, the street was your grocery store, she explained: “Pushcarts sold everything, from fruit and vegetables to fish, to secondhand books, to clothes and eyeglasses.”

In the mid-19th century, selling on the street was usually “the first rung on a ladder” to entering the American work force, Lloyd said. By 1906, immigrants made up 97 percent of the pushcart vendors, and they often were unable or not allowed to work in established businesses, she said.

In addition, the street economy was an integral part of the neighborhood, built on trusted relationships and shared experiences. “It wasn’t for tourists,” she said.

In 1906, Mayor George B. McClellan created a panel known as the Commission Appointed to Investigate the Push-Cart Problem. The group published a report that showed how entangled street vendors were with the health of the city.

“Families on the Lower East Side, in Little Italy, were relying on the income from the pushcarts for their rent,” Lloyd said. City officials realized “if we shut this down or restrict this, it is putting these people at risk,” she said.

Lloyd pointed to the popular appetizing store Russ & Daughters and the eyeglasses seller Moscot as examples of brick-and mortar businesses that began as humble pushcarts.

The way the city has managed its street vendors has changed through the years.

In the 1930s, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia pushed them inside, into spaces like Essex Market on the Lower East Side and the Arthur Avenue Retail Market in the Bronx. By the 1970s and 80s, the city began limiting the number of permits issued.

“For years, there’s been tweaking of the current system at the margin,” said Carina Kaufman-Gutierrez, the deputy director of the Street Vendor Project. “But there has not been a real comprehensive reform to the street vending system.”

She said the legislation Sanchez and other council members were working on would create a “regulated, predictable, enforceable system.”

For Alvarado, the crackdown has been devastating. She started selling food after her husband died of Covid, at the height of the pandemic. She needs to work to support herself and her two children.

“I have four tumors in my spine,” she said, “and I can’t work without help.”

She received a court date of Oct. 16, so she won’t find out how much she owes in fines until then.

But in the meantime, she is struggling. Her livelihood and her biggest investment are gone.

“That cart cost $6,000,” she said.

How much should a Citi Bike ride cost?

How much should a Citi Bike ride cost? More than the subway? Less than a cab?

Citi Bike, New York’s bike share program, is thriving. In May, the company announced an “all-time record” of 162,811 rides on a single day. Last week, that number jumped to a new record: 193,545 trips in one day.

But as the number of rides taken climbs, so do the prices; there have been two increases this year alone.

“It’s really freaking expensive to do $8 or $9 bike rides three or four times a day to get where you need to go,” said Lincoln Restler, a City Council member who lives, works and bikes in Brooklyn. “I just don’t think that’s what bike share is about.”

Restler just introduced legislation to cap the cost of a short Citi Bike ride at the cost of a subway or bus ride: $2.90.

Gabe Brosbe, a Williamsburg resident who frequently rides a Citi Bike to work in Manhattan, emailed Street Wars last month to express concern about the pricing and the lack of competition faced by Lyft, which runs Citi Bike and has a contract with the city until 2029. “It appears to me that this is a private monopoly being treated as a public utility,” he said.

In 2012, an annual Citi Bike membership was $95 and rides by members were free for the first 30 minutes. After that, rides started at $2.50 for members and $4 for nonmembers.

Now, annual memberships cost $220 a year. (Even after accounting for inflation, that’s an increase of almost $100.) This year alone, the e-bike fees have increased to 24 cents a minute from 17 cents for members, and to 36 cents a minute from 26 cents for nonmembers.

Of course, in the program’s earliest days, most of the bicycles were not battery-powered, and there weren’t that many bikes to be had. It took the next decade for docks and e-bikes to slowly spread around the city.

But the e-bikes — which are nearly effortless to ride, making hills and long distances easy and breezy — are wildly popular. They require more maintenance, however, since the batteries constantly need to be swapped out.

Lyft did not respond to a request for comment on the price increases.

Brosbe, who is a member, finds the new prices too steep. “If I go into the office three days a week, that’s $30 a week,” he said.

And yet he really loves it. “I’ve done 22,843 miles, 2,386 rides and spent 345 hours on a Citi Bike,” he said, after checking the stats on his app.

But the cost has given him pause. “I’ll probably go back to using my regular bike some more because I’m just a little bummed out about the whole thing,” he said.

His regular bike is not electric, which means arriving at work sweaty, and there’s no good place to park it. If he wants to bring it up into the office to ensure it doesn’t get stolen, he has to ask someone to call the freight elevator for him. Sometimes that can take 15 minutes, or more. “It’s very de-motivating,” he said.

Elizabeth Adams, the interim co-executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a nonprofit organization aimed at reclaiming New York City from cars, is also a Citi Bike enthusiast.

She loves the e-bikes, she said, because “meeting up with friends or going somewhere, especially going over the bridges, I don’t want to show up sweaty or gross. E-bikes are great for that! Your outfit looks good, your hair looks good. You don’t have to worry.”

She agrees with Restler that the city should step in on pricing. “If you’re treating this as a public transit system, then it should match the others,” she said, comparing Citi Bike to New York’s ferry system, which is heavily subsidized.

Brosbe definitely thinks the city should take on more responsibility. “If you think about some of the stuff that Eric Adams has said about wanting to have a healthier New York, he should be jumping into this thing with two feet,” he said.

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What we’re reading

The town hall meeting to discuss the future of Brooklyn’s Underhill Avenue bike boulevard and the Vanderbilt Avenue open street has been postponed indefinitely. [Hell Gate]
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A tour of Hart Island, the mass burial site turned public park. [The City]
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“I must have heard a hundred times, nobody’s going to read a book about Robert Moses. And I really did believe what people said, that nobody would read the book. I did believe that. Now they tell me it’s in its 74th printing. That’s a lot of books.” — Robert Caro [The New York Times]