The New York Times City Room ran a story about whether or not street vending could help alleviate New York City’s soaring unemployment rate. The article suggests that some members of the City Council as well as advocacy groups think that raising the cap on permits for street vendors might ease joblessness…
Michael Wells, co-director of the Street Vendor Project, said that the city needs to raise the number of permits to handle the surge of people who are looking to make a living. “People call because they have lost their jobs; people call because their husbands have lost their jobs; people call in anticipation of being laid off,” he said at a rally Tuesday morning on the steps of City Hall.
But he said he almost always told them that the chances of securing a legal vending permit was almost next to none. The number of New York street vending licenses for food and merchandise has been capped at fewer than 4,000 for decades — 853 general vending permits and 3,000 food permits citywide — though the Bloomberg administration introduced 1,000 new permits for fruit and vegetable vendors last year.
One sociologist weighs in…
The current set of caps was more or less put into place during the administration of Mayor Edward I. Koch, as part of an effort to clean up the streets, according to Prof. John Garber, a sociologist who has studied New York City street vending.
“They cut the number of vendors permits in half,” said Professor Garber, a who will soon be teaching at the University of Arkansas. “The number of vendors never decreased. The number of illegal vendors increased. It just forced the business of street vending to be illegal.”
“There is an erroneous theory that if you increase the number of street vendors’ permits you increase the number of vendors on the street,” Professor Garber said. “Street vending is bare-bones economics, supply and demand.” He added, “If there is no profit incentive, it doesn’t matter if they have a license or not, they are not going into street peddling.”
His research also found that vendors are often looking for other jobs while they are doing their selling on the street.
Sociologist Mitch Dunier comments on the opposition to street vending…
Opposition to broadening street vending permits comes from a number of directions, said Prof. Mitchell Duneier, a sociologist at Princeton who has also studied street vendors. Many people argue that street vending causes congestion on sidewalks and streets. In fact, the arrival of trucks as a means for delivery prompted a movement against street peddlers and their pushcarts because they “cluttered” the streets. “How much pedestrian congestion is a reasonable amount is frequently a cultural phenomenon of different neighborhoods,” he said. (Chinatown, for example, has a higher tolerance.)
Prof. Duneier added: “There has historically always been a give and take between the business community that is part of the formal economy and the informal economy. Businesspeople who pay rent and taxes are very, very skeptical.”
Garber suggests that this opposition is overstated…
Prof. Garber added that competition is overstated and that in fact, he saw many instances in which street vendor and store were more synergistic. Street vendors generally sell smaller-ticket items, while stores, because of their high-fixed costs for rent, generally try to sell higher-priced items.
“It’s fairly rare for street vendors to compete with store owners,” Professor Garber said. “The direct competition between the two is not really there realistically.” In fact, he noted that street vendors can be good for the city because they provide a sense of safety with vendors and create a urban feel and draw more foot traffic.
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