The Street Vendor Project

All street vendors are heroes, but only very few get recognized for it. Sometimes they save a city from likely calamity and end up getting phone calls from President Obama. Other times they see something, say something, and it turns out to be false alarm, like this guy near Fordham University yesterday. Sometimes they rescue pigeons.

Whatever it is, SVP is working to get vendors recognized for their overall heroism, which is why we’ll have a non-culinary award category at this year’s Vendy Awards, as we discussed recently on radio here and in print here.  Now go nominate your favorite vendor here.

$1,000 tickets for licensed street vendors are unduly harsh under any circumstance. But especially when the system under which they are heard is so much of a kangaroo court. This tape, of an ECB hearing for Mohammed Shafiqul Huda (left), shows what kind of travesty of justice can occur.

What are the problems here, apart from the general rude treatment Huda receives? 1) he clearly needs an interpreter and was not provided one, 2) he says he wants the officer to come, only to be talked out of it by the judge,  3) he in fact had a defense, that he was not vending at the time but had only gotten there 10 minutes before and was waiting for the street to open up at 6 pm, but was not given a chance to present it due to his lack of English and the judge’s leading questions. The fine? $750. SVP is appealing the case. Albor Ruiz of the Daily News covered Huda’s story here.

The easiest example of the system being unfairly stacked against NYC street vendors is this: vending fines for the most minor violations (like having a cooler poking out from underneath your cart or placing your table more than 18 inches from the curb) can cost up to $1,000. While no senior executives at Lehman, Bear Stearns or AIG has had to pay one cent for their role in the worldwide financial crisis, hard-working, tax-paying licensed vendors are required to pay $1,000 every day in New York City. When we tell people this, they simply don’t believe it — and yet we see the affected families in our office all the time. We even made a short video about some of them.

But the news is not all bleak! Council Member Stephen Levin from Brooklyn has sponsored two bills that would reduce the vending fines to pre-2005 levels.  Intros 434 and 435, which now each have 15 co-sponsors at City Council, would not only provide relief to street vendors during difficult times. As the NY Post pointed out this week, it would also allow the city to collect more revenue, because vendors would be able to pay their fines, rather than them going into default.  Sounds like a “win,win” proposition to us. We’ll be writing letters and getting signatures soon, but for now, please friend our “Lower the Fines” Facebook page here to stay updated on our progress.

New York City, with a mayor who got his start as an entrepreneur, likes to say it supports small businesses. The City’s Economic Development Corporation is even spending $1 million to open “business incubators,” in all five boroughs, to encourage the “next Google.” Sounds exciting!

At the same time, however, the City is doing nothing to save the Aqueduct Flea Market, which supports nearly 1,000 less glamorous immigrant small-business owners and is being evicted by the NY State gambling commission next week. Despite a bunch of press coverage (1,2,3) and the best efforts of the Indo-Carribean Alliance to organize the vendors and find them a new location, it seems this 30-year old Queens marketplace will be going out with a whimper. Our friends at the Center for an Urban Future said it best in their World of Opportunity report: “in most cases, immigrant-run businesses aren’t even on the radar of local economic development officials.” Why is that? And where is the outrage about Aqueduct?