Working across New York City, the Street Vendor Project (SVP) is helping street vendors navigate local regulations, ensure they can operate their businesses safely, and work toward a fairer system.
Helping to represent the voices of the estimated 20,000 vendors that operate in New York City, SVP provides services that “are very essential to the street condors community as small business owners, as hard working immigrants, veterans, and New Yorkers,” Mohamed Attia, Managing Director of SVP, tells Food Tank.
SVP, comprised of 2,000 members, works with vendors of all types, including those who sell fresh produce and hot meals. The project helps vendors understand their legal rights, convenes meetings to better understand their needs, and works with these entrepreneurs to grow their business. They also advocate for policy changes that will protect street vendors from fines and other penalties.
In 2021, SVP successfully helped pass legislation to lift the number of full-time permits available to street vendors. Over the next decade the city promises to create more than 4,000 new permits.
This change is important, Attia explains, because permits are required for vendors to run their business legally. But just over 5,000 permits are available specifically for street food vendors, and that number has not changed since the 1980s. “Sadly, the policies and the legislations and the local laws that were passing were very aggressive and hostile against street vendors,” Attia tells Food Tank.
When vendors operate without a permit, Attia continues, it is “really difficult and risky. People are taking risks such as getting arrested, getting a US$1,000 ticket, [getting] property confiscated. It is so, so difficult.”
Attia calls the caps “arbitrary” and believes the resistance to street vendors, many of whom are immigrants of color, is rooted in xenophobia. He explains that when SVP began their campaign to increase the number of permits, they looked into the rationale behind the imposed limits. But, he says, “we didn’t find anything.”
What they did find were articles denigrating street vendors. “We’ve seen people making comments like vendors make Fifth Avenue look like Istanbul on a Sunday,” Attia tells Food Tank. But, he asks, “What’s wrong with Istanbul? It’s a sunny, beautiful city. What’s wrong with that?”
Protecting street vendors’ rights is important not only for the economic security of the individual entrepreneurs and their families. Many vendors are also a vital source of affordable produce or hot, prepared foods.
“In so many areas where people are 30 minutes or more, walking distance, from any supermarket, they’re probably going to run to the food vendor who sells fresh vegetables and fruits around the corner,” Attia says.
In the future, Attia hopes to see the city’s agencies working with, rather than against, vendors. Formalizing the system and increasing the number of permits is an important step forward, but Attia also wants to see more resources made available.
“We don’t see anything to support street vendors [to help them] understand the local laws, understand how to comply with the system,” he tells Food Tank. “We don’t see much of workshops or resources being allocated and there is so much need within the community. And the need is so massive, that we just need to make the right investment…and make the right effort to reach out to these vendors and let them know that these services exist and get them to benefit from them.”
Listen to the full conversation with Mohamed Attia on Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg to hear about Attia’s own story as a street vendor, the headway SVP is making with the city’s current administration, and exciting developments that can make street vending more sustainable for the environment.
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Photo Courtesy of Anton, Unsplash
