The City Council has advanced a bill to more than double the number of food vendors in New York from the current 3,100.
That’s good, at least in theory: More food carts and trucks mean more lunch options for New Yorkers and tourists, and more opportunities for entrepreneurs.
But it’s only good in reality if the city enforces key laws to protect everyone’s quality of life — and adds some new laws, too.
New York has had food vendors as long as it has been New York. The food has changed from oysters to hot dogs to halal goat.
The vendors have changed from free blacks in the 1800s to Greek and Chinese immigrants in the early 20th century to Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian sellers — and hipsters with food trucks — today.
And since we’ve had food vendors, the city has had both eager customers and complainers.
City Hall has licensed and regulated peddlers for more than a century. Vendors can’t sell on Fifth and Madison avenues until nighttime, and in parts of Times Square at all.
And they can’t block crosswalks or bus stops.
Until Mike Bloomberg, the mayors who cared about vending carts did so only to regulate them. Mayors John Lindsay, Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani disliked the carts. Koch capped the number of permits more than three decades ago. (You need the same permit either for a cart or a truck.)
Bloomberg, though, was a wary friend — establishing 1,000 new permits for fruit and vegetable sellers.
Vendors and the City Council sense a better friend in Mayor Bill de Blasio. The current bill, sponsored by northern Manhattan Councilman Mark Levine, would direct the city to award 635 new permits a year over seven years (35 each year would be for veterans). It already has the support of a quarter of the council.
What’s good about this? Better food options: People line up in Midtown to get food they can’t get at boring salad chains.
And it’s good for vendors who can’t get permits. Right now, they have to work for people who secured the permits years ago, often paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for the privilege (similar to how taxi drivers pay medallion owners to drive their cabs). The bill would favor workers already on a waiting list.
What’s bad about it? As with anything in New York — whether Uber or Elmo — the people who have something to sell set up shop where the money is. That’s where the city’s streets and sidewalks are already most crowded: Midtown Manhattan, Main Street in Flushing, the Met Museum uptown.
And too many food trucks can create an unpleasant environment. Their generators, plus charcoal, are the least efficient way to create power and heat.
Only in undeveloped countries do cities have an entire industry based off a portable backup power source that’s so bad for people breathing the air — the generators don’t have catalytic converters — that they should really be used only in emergencies.
And too many vendors block pedestrians — walk up Fifth Avenue and see how many ice-cream trucks are illegally blocking each crosswalk.
Levine acknowledges these concerns, and notes that his bill would create a special vendor enforcement squad to improve conditions a year before the city awards new permits in 2018. (The city is already better enforcing the rules around the Met Museum.)
And though it’s not in the bill, he says the council is exploring how it might encourage or require cleaner power and heat generation. A Queens company, MOVE Systems, has natural-gas and battery-powered carts that each take the equivalent of 186 cars off the streets when compared with an old-fashioned cart.
With everyone competing for the same sidewalk and street space, it’s also a good opportunity to think harder about how we use the streets and sidewalks. Midtown intersections need more sidewalk space anyway, whether we add new vending carts or not.
And with good enforcement of better laws, the city could overturn the ban on carts on Fifth and Madison avenues during the day.
Rockefeller Center, for example, is crowded all the time. Rather than force nighttime residents and tourists to breathe in toxic emissions because the important people have gone home for the day, let’s have everyone walking by cleaner, better carts no matter what time it is.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.