Much Ado About "Mobile Merchants"
Among other urban trends, the 2010s were the decade of the food truck. While street vendors are a long-established part of the culture in certain parts of the U.S. (most famously Los Angeles), the idea of getting a meal from a roving truck hit the mainstream in a different way in the past decade, and with it a rapidly growing number of trucks serving upscale or adventurous cuisine.
And it's not just food. "Mobile merchants" can sell clothing and other wares. We've seen the rise of the pop-up shop and some weirder examples—The Precariat Shoppe by Johnny Sanphillippo features a mobile woodworker's shop and even a mobile veterinarian! On a recent trip to Colorado, I wanted to explore downtown Denver sans luggage, so I simply checked my suitcase for a couple hours in a van parked outside Union Station.
These things are an extremely positive trend. The important question for all strong cities and towns that they help address is:
What is the lowest possible bar of entry to becoming a successful entrepreneur?
The answer, in the modern city, is the pop-up shop, street cart, farmer's market stall, or food truck. It's an opportunity to test a concept with low overhead costs and thus low risk if you fail. Entrepreneurs need this kind of cheap option, and brick-and-mortar real estate too often isn't it anymore, especially in richer cities.
Many wealthy U.S. cities are seeing a proliferation of chain businesses even in historic neighborhoods, as the only establishments that can afford the rent anymore. This homogenization and centralization of the economy has worrisome social and economic consequences, as Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance describes in a 2000 transcript.
Or, as Charles Marohn puts it in Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity,
“To build a productive place, people must be able to start with nothing and, through their efforts, end up with something.”
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back?
Street vendors near MacArthur Park, Los Angeles. (Image: Google Street View)
With the upscaling of various forms of itinerant retail has come a push for legalization of these vendors—but unfortunately, that process often ends up laden with way too many conditions and caveats. Witness conflicts over supposed expansions of street vending in Chicago and Los Angeles.
In LA, where street vending has been an under-the-table institution seemingly forever, legalization doesn't have all vendors happy. State law decriminalized street vending in 2018 and required cities to come up with regulations that would allow it, but in LA, there’s a real risk that those regulations are actually going to make life harder for vendors who have been operating informally. LAist reports that many vendors are unclear on the new rules, the cost of a permit, in what cases one is required and what conditions it imposes on them. At best, the system does not appear ready for prime time.
At worst, it will eliminate the bottom of the industry—the true “start from nothing” entrepreneurs—and favor those with established success and some capital put aside. Says the California Globe:
However, the lines of carne taco vendors and booths selling everything from clothes to tools to used video games may soon be a thing of the past.
Last year the Los Angeles City Council passed the Sidewalk and Park Vending Program unanimously. Under the new law, vendors need proper business licenses, health permits, and perhaps most prohibitively, a $541 fee to operate starting July 1st.
A family selling fruit, who did not want to use their name, talked with the Globe, with a member of her family translating Spanish.
“Our business is gone,” said the mother of the family. “This is all we had, and now we need to get [$541] from nowhere.” One of their sons said “We probably need to sell our TV for this.”
The daughter translating told the Globe “My family gave everything to come here, and now they’re trying to take away what little we have made.”
In Chicago, a "mobile merchants" plan put forth by then-mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2018 was shot down amid concerns from aldermen about competition with established businesses, despite that the plan would already have subjected such vendors to a long list of time, parking, and signage restrictions. The city has allowed only four mobile merchants so far to legally test their concepts.
Food trucks in Chicago are newly allowed up to a 4-hour parking limit in a single spot instead of 2-hour, but still face concerns from elected officials, says the Sun-Times:
Ald. Michael Scott Jr. (24th) said his West Side ward can’t afford to “lose any more brick-and-mortars.” He’s a bit concerned about the competition between stores and mobile boutiques.
“If I’m a place that sells wedding dresses and you come out and you buy shoes, that’s a complement. But if we’re both selling dresses or wedding dresses, it’s gonna be more of a competition,” Scott said.
“I just want to make sure that a brick-and-mortar store will have the ability to say, ‘I think this is cutting into some of my profits’ and you’ll look at that and adjust kind of where that vehicle can park.”
These concerns are misguided. Truck and sidewalk vendors serve a different niche from incumbent businesses who operate at the much larger scale of a permanent storefront. The role of local government should not be to protect those incumbents from competition, but to foster a healthy economic ecosystem in which businesses can succeed at any scale.
How Should City Officials Think About Street Vendors?
The Fashion District, downtown Los Angeles—a famous destination where hundreds of small-scale retailers sell fabric, clothing, accessories. Food carts also visible in background.
Truly smart city leadership would view the presence of unlicensed vendors as useful feedback that the rules on where you can and can't open a business, and how, ought to be relaxed, not made more complicated. Underground economies exist where the formal economy is failing to meet people’s needs. We can stand to tolerate a lot more chaos.
If your concern is competition over scarce sidewalk space, perhaps the lesson to draw is that too much space is given over to cars, and not enough reserved for people that these street vendors could coexist with pedestrians. Consider converting a travel lane to street parking that could also be used for vending.
If your concern is health and safety regulations, that is understandable. I want to know that the food I’m eating from a street cart won’t make me sick. The city’s job is to find a process to ensure that that is simple enough that street carts can comply with it without being driven out of business. (Also, I know more people who have gotten food poisoning from sit-down restaurants than from street food. Just saying.)
If your concern is that zoning be regular and the mix of land uses in a neighborhood be predictable, the success of these establishments in a place makes clear that there's demand for commercial uses in that place that may not be allowed or feasible in brick-and-mortar buildings. It’s the zoning that should change, not the mobile shops and food trucks that should go away.
Unlicensed street vendors are an indicator of a need for rules that allow retail in a place without prohibitive hurdles. Listen to the feedback you're getting. Lower the bar of entry. And be careful not to impose too much order on a phenomenon that thrives on a little bit of chaos.
(Cover photo: Telegraph Ave, Berkeley, CA. Via Wikimedia Commons.)
This neighborhood’s bulk-buying club for fresh fruit and veggies presents a model that other communities can easily emulate.