A new kind of street life has emerged in NYC over the past few months. Curbside dining has become a critical lifeline for many food businesses, people have spilled out onto the streets and changed how we engage with the sidewalk, food, and those around us. Mobile food vendors, already curbside establishments, were among the first businesses to hit the streets after lockdown. You can read it as resilience or you can read it as urgent and necessary given that food vendors had been unable to operate for weeks upon weeks. Either way, they are mainstays. OGs.
I wanted to dive a little deeper into the impact that COVID has had on mobile food vendors and try to learn more about the challenges these small businesses had been facing pre-pandemic. Initial research on the internet suggested that street vendors’ interactions with the NYPD have been tense for a while. Most mobile food vendors are immigrants and people of color who are already highly policed and distrustful of law enforcement. Calls from organizations such as the Street Vendor Project aim to end police enforcement of the city administrative code that regulates street vending.
Street vendors are primarily women of color, military veterans, low-wage immigrant workers who come from communities that have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 and individuals who have reported income losses of 70 to 90 percent. — Street Vendor Project
I figured that a dataset provided by the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings would be a good place to start. The dataset details violations made by mobile food vendors from 2016 through 2019. While there is some data for the first three months of 2020, data for the following months of April through August are incomplete due to the lockdown as well as DeBlasio’s (shaky) efforts to suspend the ticketing of mobile food vendors. For this reason, I decided to focus on pre-pandemic violations to try to get a better sense of what vendors were up against.
The first thing I wanted to look at was the most commonly ticketed type of violation in 2019— which turned out to be Administrative Code 315 violations with 2,065 tickets issued in 2019, accounting for over 50% of all violations that year. Aided by a copy of the Administrative Code, I learned that 315 violations have to do with the placement of carts: where they are allowed to vend, how close and how far away the cart must be from the curb, proximity to hospitals, etc.
I figured that there would be an inherent seasonality to mobile food vending. It seems obvious, given that these carts operate outside. Diving into month by month counts of violations in 2019 did show a late spring/ summer spike, but much of this can be explained by the yearly issuance of 1,000 seasonal licenses valid from April 1st through October 31st.
I was also curious to see when vendors might be receiving the heftiest fines. Depending on the violation, penalties range from $50 — $1000.
Again, there is a seasonal pattern in the fluctuation of fines, peaking in the summer. This may be explained by more crowded summer streets, making cart placement more challenging. Furthermore, one vendor can be penalized for multiple violations, which is particularly common when it comes to cart placement regulations because space limitations impact storage, placement, and operations. I included available 2020 data to see if these fine averages tracked for the first few months, and noticed that there were some violations recorded in September. The concerning thing about this is that DeBlasio still has not announced that the NYPD has resumed its enforcement of mobile food vending administrative codes. The absolute number of penalties for September of 2020 issued is significantly lower than that in 2019, suggesting inconsistency in policing, while average fines are higher, suggesting that vendors are being more highly penalized for infractions.
I also wanted to know where these violations were occurring, so I grouped total violations by borough. At first, I looked at admin code 315 violations as a proportion of total, but quickly noticed that while these violations were the overwhelming majority in Manhattan, the same was not true for Brooklyn and the Bronx.
Manhattan overall has the highest number of overall violations, which makes sense given the number of vendors who operate in Manhattan as well as its density— Admin code 315 violations regarding cart placement are more frequent given Manhattan streetscapes. The blue proportions illustrated in the graph above are violations that pertain to licensing issues specifically — there have always been un-licensed food vendors in NYC, but the spatial distribution of unlicensed vending is interesting to dig into. In the Bronx, most violations are related to licensing — specifically regarding operating without a license. While the proportion of license-related tickets in Brooklyn is lower, it still constitutes a significant proportion of tickets. There are 200 borough specific licenses for the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens each, versus the 2,900 citywide permits. This is to keep some vendors out of Manhattan, where food vendors are highly concentrated. These borough specific licenses are beneficial to those who are able to obtain them, however the number of tickets issues for license violations indicate that 200 permits may not be enough in Brooklyn and the Bronx if people are still taking the risk of vending without a permit. The unfortunate effect of this is that those who are penalized for license violations in these two boroughs are likely immigrants and people of color, who are also serving communities of color.
The cap on permits has been brought up as a huge challenge for food vendors — both in the limited number available as well as the illegality of transferring licenses or selling licenses. Street vendors and advocacy groups are currently lobbying to introduce a bill (intro 1116) to lift these caps.
