A few years ago, we sat across from a senior official at the city's Department of Transportation and asked why nobody in city government would touch street vending. The answer was blunt, and it has aged badly for everyone who pays rent on a New York block.
According to that official, the Street Vendor Project, a program of the nonprofit Urban Justice Center, had learned to pull every permit question out of the regulatory lane and drop it into the justice lane. A cap on licenses became an immigration issue. A siting rule became a civil rights issue. In the years after COVID, any agency employee who pushed back risked being branded anti-immigrant, and in New York City that label could end a career. So, the official told us, the people paid to say no stopped saying it.
That is one official's account, and the Street Vendor Project would tell the story another way. But the public record shows where it led. The old penalties are gone, the group's former co-director now runs City Hall's vendor office, and the system meant to replace what came before is still being built.
THE GROUP NEVER HID IT. ITS OWN WORDS CALL THE WORK BUILDING POWER
Nobody needs a source inside government to see the framing. In its own hiring posts, the Street Vendor Project describes its work as "building the power of working class, immigrant communities of color" and as movement building for social and economic justice. That is an honest mission statement for an organizing group. It is also a declaration that the fight was never only about permits.
The framing showed up every time the city tried to enforce. When City Hall moved vending enforcement to the Sanitation Department in 2023, the group's director answered that vendors were small businesses, not trash to be collected, and the group rallied to reverse the move. When more than 150 business owners signed a petition against raising the license cap, the group's then deputy director dismissed the idea that vendors compete with restaurants as a myth.
Each response made the same move. A question about operations, about who enforces what and who competes with whom, came back as a question about who the vendors are. Once the debate is about identity, anyone asking about rules has to explain themselves first.
THREE MAYORS, THREE ENFORCERS, AND NOBODY EVER BUILT A SYSTEM THAT WORKED
The city did plenty to make the advocates' job easier. After police arrested a woman selling churros in a Brooklyn subway station in 2019, Mayor Bill de Blasio pulled the NYPD out of the lead enforcement role. The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection took over in 2021. Its inspectors were civilians who could not compel a vendor to show ID, so many summonses were never issued, and by 2023 the agency's own commissioner was suggesting it had been the wrong home for the job.
Mayor Eric Adams handed enforcement to Sanitation that April. The new Vending Bureau launched with nearly 40 people. Police kept writing the most tickets anyway, and the Health and Parks departments kept writing their own. In 2024 the city issued more than 10,000 tickets to vendors.
Jessica Tisch, who ran Sanitation through the handoff and later became police commissioner, gave the Council the most honest summary anyone in government has offered. "The paradigms that we have in New York City, around vending, are broken," she said. She added that Sanitation had not been staffed for vending enforcement at the scale the city needed.
Three mayors. Three lead enforcers. Not one system that a restaurant owner, a vendor, or a customer could explain.
THE COUNCIL TOOK THE PENALTIES OFF FIRST AND LEFT THE LICENSES FOR LATER
Then the Council moved, and the order it moved in matters. In June 2025 it passed Intro 47-B, which turned most vending crimes into civil offenses, by a vote of 40 to 8. Adams vetoed it, arguing it sent the wrong message in the middle of a crackdown on illegal vending. It became law anyway. In January 2026 the Council overrode his vetoes of the rest of the reform package too.
Under the new law, the city's first response to a vendor breaking the rules is supposed to be education, with civil summonses as the fallback. Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on getting police out of vendor enforcement entirely.
The licenses are a different story. The city has more than 20,000 vendors and only 6,880 food vending permits and 853 general vendor licenses, numbers that have barely moved since 1979. The Health Department began offering 2,200 new supervisory food licenses a year this July, a pace set for five years. The 10,500 new general vendor licenses do not open until after January 15, 2027.
The penalties came off at once. The licenses arrive over five years. In between, by the city's own permit count, most vendors on New York's streets are working without one.
A PERMITTED CART GETS INSPECTED EVERY YEAR. THE ONE WITHOUT A PERMIT NEVER PASSED ONE
Here is what that gap means at the curb. A permitted food cart is inspected by the Health Department at least once a year. It has to be cleaned, serviced and stored at an approved commissary. Its food has to come from a licensed source, and its vendor has to pass a food protection course before getting a license.
An unpermitted cart has been through none of that, because the inspection is tied to the permit. It may be spotless. It may be run by a careful cook with twenty years on the block. Nobody in the city has checked.
The restaurant behind that cart has been checked plenty. It pays rent, payroll, insurance and the full weight of its own inspections. Storefront owners around Corona Plaza complained about trash and rats years ago. The business district and community board around the Hub in the Bronx sent complaints straight to the city. Those complaints were real, and under the new rules the strongest tool the city has is a civil ticket, if someone writes one.
THE ADVOCATES PUSHED THE BILLS THROUGH. NOW ONE OF THEIR LEADERS RUNS THE OFFICE
In March, Mamdani named Carina Kaufman-Gutierrez, co-director of the Street Vendor Project, as the first executive director of the city's new Office of Street Vendor Services. The Council member who sponsored the bill creating the office said in the announcement that they had worked closely with the Street Vendor Project to pass it.
The office does not write tickets. Sanitation still leads enforcement. But the office is the city's front door for vendors, it sits inside the Department of Small Business Services, and City Hall describes its mission in the same economic justice language the advocates used to win the fight.
Nothing about the appointment breaks a rule. Kaufman-Gutierrez spent years on this issue and knows it as well as anyone in the city. But when a leader of the group that won the fight becomes the city's point person on the result, the people inside government who might have pushed back have even less reason to try.
WHAT THE OTHER SIDE SAYS, AND WHY IT STILL DOES NOT ANSWER THE QUESTION
The advocates have real arguments. A cap frozen since 1979 created the black market in the first place, and thousands of people sat on waiting lists with no legal way in. Research cited by advocates finds that 96 percent of the city's vendors are immigrants, which means a criminal summons can carry a deportation risk that a parking ticket never would. The reform package also added enforcement agents and raised civil penalties for some siting violations. And the competition point has some truth to it: a family sitting down for dinner is usually not choosing between a restaurant and a cart.
All of that can be true. None of it explains why the penalties had to come off before the inspection system was ready to cover the carts the city now tolerates. That was a choice about sequence, and it was made in a climate where, by one senior official's account, saying slow down could cost you your job.
Street vendors are the oldest small business in New York, and they belong on its streets. What the city still owes the people eating from those carts, and the people paying rent behind them, is a straight answer to who checks the food and who is still allowed to say no.
