Food-Cart Turf Wars Go Upscale

If you haven’t visited the Big Apple recently, New York’s street-food vendors are selling much more than hot dogs and pretzels these days. Without setting foot in a restaurant, you can have your pick of fancy cupcakes, chicken-Thai basil dumplings, vegan tacos and other culinary offerings.

New Yorkers may stand to benefit from an even greater selection of upscale street foods soon because the City Council will consider a proposal this fall to increase the current number of food vending permits from 3,100 to 25,000, says the New York Times.

Rising unemployment has struck white-collar workers as hard as anyone else, leading more white-collar workers with former six-figure salaries to try their hand as food-cart vendors. But they’re unwittingly clashing with more traditional hawkers of gyros and kebabs. Most of the veteran vendors are immigrants, and many have occupied a certain street corner for decades; in some cases, they’ve even handed down their location on a certain block to future generations within the same family.

The city’s Health Department charges $200 for a two-year street permit, which can be renewed indefinitely, but the city doesn’t regulate where vendors park their carts, aside from enforcing parking regulations and barring street-food vendors from certain streets. Because demand for a limited number of permits is so high, the black-market value of these permits can be as much as $15,000.

Upscale food merchants new to the street-vending scene have been cursed, had their lives threatened, seen their tires slashed and otherwise been told that they’re not welcome. This street-level bullying comes not just from other vendors, who view their presence as “an unfair advantage in a desperate economy,” but also by brick-and-mortar restaurants, according to the New York Times.

Although you might think that a hungry customer looking for lunch will still head for the hot dog stand instead of the cupcakes, many vendors see it differently, believing that if someone has $5 in their pocket, each of two vendors has a 50/50 shot at getting the customer.

What’s the solution — should the city step in and start assigning street-cart locations when permits are issued? Or should we leave it to the vendors themselves to duke it out in the kind of turf wars more commonly associated with drug lords?

Tags: recession

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