Once Again, LA Has Failed Its Street Vendors

As we find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic coupled with a recession — an overlapping crisis none of us have ever faced before — the scale of human need is too large to comprehend. Tens of thousands are sick and dying. Millions have lost income. Millions more are struggling to maintain their access to food and housing.

In an environment of near-universal desperation like this one, getting relief requires a loud voice to make your needs heard. Unfortunately, those who need the most help right now are often people we’ve forced into the shadows all along.

The faces of LA’s shadow food economy are its street vendors. There are about 50,000 street vendors operating in Los Angeles, 10,000 of whom sell food. Many are undocumented. Many are refugees, whose families came here fleeing violence in Central America. Many are seniors. 80 percent are women of color.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that street vendors are the lifeblood of LA’s food culture. They are part of the visible fabric of our streets. In food deserts, where decades of business disinvestment has made fresh fruit and homemade meals difficult to find, street vendors are an oasis. Their presence makes sidewalks safer and more welcoming. For this, they make an average of $10,000 per year in revenue.

But despite the street vendor’s value to neighborhoods and financial vulnerability, LA’s city government has cracked down even harder on street vendors than other LA food workers in this crisis. Los Angeles’s City Council, as one of its first acts of pandemic response, banned street vendors without licenses — which is the vast majority of vendors. Grocery stores, restaurants, and food trucks, meanwhile, have been allowed — with some restrictions — to continue selling food. In some cases, regulations on those businesses have even been loosened to allow innovations like delivery cocktails.

Street vendors cannot work remotely. They cannot file for unemployment. And while many of Los Angeles’s newly out-of-work will be receiving checks from the IRS, LA’s thousands of undocumented vendors won’t get them. Our city has made their livelihood impossible with seemingly no thought to how they would survive.

---

This recent ban on vending is just the latest scuffle in the tense relationship between LA and street vendors, though; part of a decades-long pattern of our city government disenfranchising — and even overtly sabotaging — these workers.

The city’s current tradition of vending really began in the 1980s, with the arrival of refugees from war-torn El Salvador and other Central American nations under the United States Refugee Act. But brick and mortar store owners complained that vendors were infringing on their business, and the city immediately took action on their behalf — by vigorously enforcing laws against street vending. Then the sidewalk economy got organized. With the help of legal, labor, and immigration activism groups, a movement was created to legalize vending and bring it out of the shadows. Under pressure from these activists, LA’s City Council finally agreed to put together a system for licensing vendors in 2013.

And then… the City Council did nothing. For years. Until 2018, when they were forced to take action by a state law that mandated cities to come up with rules for legalizing vending. Finally, a system was created to allow street vendors to operate like the valued contributors to the local economy that they always were.

It was a victory, but a marginal one. Unlicensed vending was downgraded from a misdemeanor to an infraction, which would keep more vendors out of jail and out of the grasp of federal immigration agencies. But the system that local officials created for actually acquiring a license was a Kafkaesque maze. Food vendors had to purchase permits from both the City and the County, were forbidden to sell near stadiums and other high-traffic areas, and were required to use a County commissary. The cost of operating a food cart rose significantly, for some by thousands of dollars. Regulations were so complex that no existing type of food cart on the market satisfied the requirements for the City, County, and the state. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the time since the new rules have been put in place, only 29 licenses for food vendors have been distributed.

Now, under the banner of emergency measures, vending is illegal once again. After so much energy and effort spent to make the city recognize the legitimacy of their work, vendors find themselves re-criminalized — right back where they were two years ago, and for decades before that.

Slowly, a patchwork quilt of relief is coming together. Governor Gavin Newsom recently announced a state fund that will offer a one-time payment of $500 to undocumented workers. Inclusive Action for the City, an LA nonprofit, has partnered with other organizations to create a Street Vendor Emergency Fund that provides payments of $400 to vendors whose work has been affected, to which you can donate. Mayor Eric Garcetti has launched a program to provide debit cards of between $700 and $1,500 to workers who have seen their business suffer in the pandemic. Undocumented workers are eligible for this program but not given priority, and must enter a lottery for the scarce benefits — the website immediately crashed under the weight of 56,000 applications on the first day.

This money, while helpful, is not enough for anyone to live on beyond a couple of weeks. And so the street vendors will go back to work — outside the law once again. They’re used to operating in the shadows. Already, vendors are gathering on street corners, dispersing when police arrive to menace them. They’re operating much the same way they did a few years ago, except they’re now wearing masks. Some are even selling them.

All of these vendors are operating without any official guidance on how to protect themselves and their customers. All they’ve been told is to stop working entirely, an option many of them do not have — and have never had.

Ironically, street vending could be one of the safer food service options available in a pandemic; meals being served outside allows for more room for customers to spread out. What if the city spent more resources on making street vending safe than on making vendors afraid? What if, as it has for every other food service business, the city implemented social distancing rules for street vendors? What if the city allowed vendors access to food that was intended for sporting events that will never happen — food that could be served to low-income people but instead is now rotting in distribution centers? What if the city even loosened vending regulations to allow more micro-businesses to pop up, injecting life into the local economy as so many larger businesses fail?

Los Angeles has never done right by its vendors. This crisis was an opportunity to make up for decades of cruelty — to give neighborhood vendors the opportunity to serve food safely and legally, and help fill the gaps left by dried-up supply chains and shuttered restaurants. Instead, the city has done the opposite. We’ve failed them again.

Nithya Raman is an urban planner who has focused on urban poverty, housing, and homelessness. She is currently a candidate for Los Angeles City Council in District 4.

• Street Vending Has Been Banned Effectively by the City of Los Angeles [ELA]