Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at bills introduced in the City Council to improve conditions for street vendors. We’ll also get details on a lawsuit challenging a partnership between the police in Nassau County and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
It was a quick question in the lightning round of the final debate among Democratic candidates for mayor: Should the city increase the number of permits for street vendors?
All seven candidates on the stage raised their hands.
But it is not a question the City Council is looking to answer anytime soon.
The Council could vote as soon as next week to decriminalize violations for street vendors and mobile food trucks, making them subject only to fines.
Another bill would lift the cap on permits for street vendors. That cap means that only a fraction of the 20,000 vendors operating in the city have official permission to sell food and merchandise. About half that number are on a waiting list. The city has issued only 15 new licenses so far this year, according to testimony at a hearing last month. A 2018 law authorized 445 new permits a year, but testimony at a City Council hearing last month indicated that only 382 vendors had gotten licenses in the three years since the law took effect.
The bill to lift the cap on licenses was introduced by Pierina Sanchez, a Bronx Democrat who said she knows about street vendors’ experiences: “I am the daughter and granddaughter of street vendors,” she said at the hearing.
She said street vendors could wait decades for a permit. She also said that 70 percent of street vendors operate without licenses, “and in my district, 80 or 90 percent — not because they do not want to follow the rules, but because we’ve created a system that locks them out.”
But Mayor Eric Adams defended the permit system when he was asked about it before the hearing, declaring that “we give out vendor licenses appropriately.” He also said that when vendors choke sidewalks, “then it hurts legitimate businesses.”
“So those who are saying, ‘Just give vendor licenses to everyone,’ we’re not going to do that.” He also said, “People don’t want to see a free-for-all in their community around vendoring.”
Putting more licenses in circulation would bring in as much as $59 million in revenue for the city if everyone on the waiting list received a permit, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office.
That is significantly more than the office estimated just last year, when it said that eliminating the backlog would bring in only $17 million.
Alaina Turnquist, an analyst with the office, cautioned that the boost to the city’s finances would probably be minimal, because the city would have to cover additional administrative costs. And Eric Mosher, an economist with the office, said that giving out more licenses might not lead to an increase in vendors on the streets. He said the vendor population would probably remain roughly the same because someone’s decision to work as a street vendor is “more dependent on individual socioeconomic conditions” than city policies.
Opponents say that lifting the limit would be unfair to brick-and-mortar restaurants and stores. Barbara Blair, the president of the Garment District Alliance, a business improvement district in Midtown Manhattan, said the bills before the Council would “only complicate the chaos in our neighborhoods and make rule enforcement more challenging.”
Vendors’ advocates say that no industry in the city faces enforcement from as many agencies. Carina Kaufman-Gutierrez, the deputy director of the Street Vendor Project at the Urban Justice Center, which has pressed the Council to pass all the bills, said that at least seven city agencies could write up violations, including the police and enforcement agents from the Sanitation Department and the Parks Department.
The Street Vendor Project said that by its tally, the Police Department had issued more than 9,300 summonses in 2024, more than twice as many as the year before.
Kaufman-Gutierrez said summonses could be issued for relatively small infractions. “For having your license in your backpack instead of around your neck, you could get a criminal summons,” she said. She said that vendors had also been issued summonses for being too close to a crosswalk. “You need to be 10 feet away,” she said. “If a vendor is nine and a half feet away, that could be a criminal summons and a fine.”
Weather
It will be hot again today, with a high in the mid-90s and a chance of afternoon showers and thunderstorms. Tonight will be mostly cloudy with a low near 72 and a chance of storms.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until the Fourth of July.
Cuomo concedes to Mamdani
Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblyman and democratic socialist, held a commanding advantage over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral primary, thanks to a strong showing in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Voters’ ranked choices have not been tabulated — and won’t be until the Board of Elections reallocates lower-performing candidates’ votes next week. Under the city’s ranked-choice voting system, a candidate needed 50 percent of the vote to win on Tuesday. Neither Mamdani nor Cuomo crossed that threshold.
But on Tuesday night, Cuomo conceded the primary and congratulated Mamdani. Later, in a phone call with The New York Times, Cuomo said that he “wanted to look at the numbers and the ranked-choice voting to decide about what to do in the future, because I’m also on an independent line. And that’s the decision, that’s what I was saying. I want to analyze and talk to some colleagues.”
Mamdani tapped into unease about the city’s affordability crisis, drawing new voters who rejected Cuomo’s centrist Democratic outlook. Both candidates promised to stand up to President Trump and to reduce anxiety over affordability and public safety. But they disagreed on how to achieve those goals.
The latest New York news
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How hot it was: The temperature in Central Park hit 99 degrees on Tuesday, making it the city’s hottest day since 2012.
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The final prosecution witness: At the sex trafficking and racketeering trial of the rap mogul Sean Combs, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations read text messages about escort prices, hotel reservations and payments for sexual encounters.
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Bridging the doctor-patient divide: In Brooklyn, at an event aimed at showcasing physicians as real individuals, doctors humanized their experiences by sharing their pride and imperfections. The event seeks to address the mistrust of doctors and enhance the doctor-patient relationship.
Lawsuit challenges a partnership with ICE
Soon after President Trump was inaugurated in January, Nassau County announced a partnership with federal immigration officials to give police officers the power to conduct migrant arrests. Nassau was one among many. Hundreds of police agencies across the nation worked out similar arrangements, giving Trump’s immigration crackdown a crucial boost.
Now the partnership between Nassau County and the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency is being challenged in a lawsuit that calls the arrangement illegal. The lawsuit, the first of its kind in New York State, was filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which said the county’s partnership violated state law, undermined constitutional protections and promoted racial profiling.
My colleague Luis Ferré-Sadurní writes that if the civil liberties union wins, similar agreements involving other jurisdictions in New York could be threatened. Two other counties that lean conservative, Broome and Niagara, have signed partnerships with ICE in 2025. And Rensselaer County has had a pact with the federal immigration authorities since 2018.
Chris Boyle, a spokesman for Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive and a Trump ally, said that 10 Nassau County detectives who had been authorized to make immigration arrests were still being trained.
Blakeman said in February that the main mission of Nassau County officers who embedded with ICE teams would be to detain undocumented immigrants accused or convicted of crimes. He said that the officers would also conduct background checks of anyone they arrested, even for low-level offenses, and notify ICE when suspects lacked legal status.
METROPOLITAN diary
Alterations
Dear Diary:
I have a trusty tailor who is tucked away near Grand Central. He is reliable, affordable and only mildly judgmental. Over the years, I have brought him pants to hem, jackets to nip, shirts to taper.
Then came the pandemic. I lost a lot of weight and, feeling quite triumphant, bought a wardrobe two sizes smaller.
My sleek new suits needed some minor alterations, so I brought them to my tailor.
He nodded approvingly.
“Looking good,” he said, and then added, almost offhandedly: “I’ll leave a little room … for when you gain it back.”
I laughed, but inside, I was slightly annoyed. This was the new me! This was forever!
Three years, countless carbs and a few existential crises later, I walked back into his shop sheepishly with some of my clothes and my now rounder figure.
I braced for an “I told you so.”
The tailor said nothing. He just smiled, pulled out his measuring tape and got to work — leaving, perhaps, just a little extra room again.
— Eugene Dayanghirang
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Alyce McFadden, Davaughnia Wilson, Luke Caramanico and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post City Council Wrestles With Street Vending Rules appeared first on New York Times.
