By Marco Shalma.

Before New York became a city of food halls, it was a city of carts. You didn’t need a brand, a build-out, or a pitch deck to feed people here. You needed a grill, a cooler, a corner, and the nerve to stand outside in the rain at 2 a.m. selling hot dogs, halal, tamales, coffee, flowers, fruit, whatever the block needed. That wasn’t chaos. That was the city working.

For decades, sidewalk vendors were New York’s most democratic economy. Immigrants fresh off planes. Families sending money home. Hustlers building something from nothing. Hot-dog carts near construction sites. Halal carts outside clubs. Fruit vendors posted up where trains emptied. It wasn’t curated. It wasn’t optimized. It was alive.

At its peak, this ecosystem supported an estimated 23,000 mobile food and merchandise vendors across the five boroughs. Roughly 20,500 food vendors and 2,400 goods vendors; according to a 2024 survey by the Street Vendor Project and the Immigration Research Initiative. That wasn’t fringe commerce. That was one of the largest micro-entrepreneur economies in the city.

Today, that ecosystem hasn’t disappeared because people stopped wanting street food. It disappeared because New York built a system that made it nearly impossible to exist legally, and then quietly replaced it with something easier to manage, easier to insure, and easier to monetize.

What looks like progress on paper is, in practice, a rerouting. Permit caps froze access. Enforcement escalated risk. Open Streets and SAPO turned “public space” into paperwork-heavy zones only formal operators could survive. Rising rents finished the job. The street didn’t get safer. It got gated.

Now the city feels crowded but sells less of itself.

Why Street Vendors Got Shut Out

The permit system is effectively frozen. The same 2024 report estimates that nearly three-quarters of NYC’s street vendors operate without a license. Not for lack of trying or demand but because legal permits remain capped and hard to get. 

A draft legislative reform (recently advanced) aims to introduce up to 2,000 new mobile food-vendor licenses and 2,100 general-vendor licenses per year over five years, as part of the proposal associated with Intro 431-A.  But that’s reactive. The damage is already done. Decades of caps, enforcement, and a parallel shift to brick-and-mortar halls baked the exclusion in.

Vendors who operate without licenses remain exposed to constant enforcement, fines, confiscation, and criminalization even while they’re pressing paycheck to paycheck. 

Open Streets, SAPO: The System That Built the Gatekeepers

After COVID, the city expanded “open streets” initiatives, streets closed to cars and designated for walking, cycling, pop-ups, and community events. That could have been a renaissance for grassroots commerce. Instead, the permitting regime turned those spaces into gated zones.

Every activity on Open Streets requires a permit from the Street Activity Permit Office (SAPO), with fees, insurance requirements, community stakeholder sign-offs, proof of outreach, and logistical demands that make small-scale vending or pop-ups nearly impossible.

That means the “open street” renaissance disproportionately benefits actors who already operate inside formal structures, such as BIDs, nonprofits with 501(c)(3) status, or firms with capital, not the individual immigrant vendor hoping to sell tamales after midnight. The red tape effectively locks out organic, neighborhood-rooted street commerce.

At the same time, the city extended or renewed moratoriums on new street fair and vendor permit issuances through 2025 and beyond. That keeps competition artificially constricted and makes available spots, both in public spaces and permitted vending, far too few.

So policy decisions meant to “regulate for safety” or “manage public space” ended up constructing a pipeline that funnels demand and visibility into a few curated halls and markets.

Urbanspace (And Its Peers) Step In

With the streets cordoned off, permits frozen, and independent vendors marginalized, the vacuum was obvious. Enter Urbanspace and similar operators. They lease high-value real estate and build out food halls, holiday market stalls, and curated “public” markets.

These venues come with covered roofs, regulated sanitation, curated menus, vendor fees, and full compliance with licensing, everything a small-fry vendor cannot realistically meet on their own. What’s more, they occupy high-traffic, tourist-heavy zones that had once been served by informal carts.

So walking down Union Square, Madison Square, Bryant Park, and other zones today, you see sleek stalls, polished signage, and self-checkout kiosks, not the loose chaos of a dozen vendors yelling “tacos, halal, hot coffee” into the wind.

From a politician’s or real estate perspective, mission accomplished. The city tidied up. The sidewalks look orderly. The tax filings are traceable. Insurance is in check. But what’s hidden is the cultural cost.

The Human Cost: 23,000 Voices Sidelined

The 23,000-vendor estimate from the 2024 study isn’t just a statistic. It represents thousands of immigrant micro-entrepreneurs, the people who once carried vendor culture forward. Ninety-six percent of non-veteran vendors were born outside the U.S.

These are folks with limited English, limited capital, and no commercial real estate holdings, precisely the people who made NYC vibrant, rough around the edges, and alive. The street vendor economy contributed hundreds of millions annually in mostly informal commerce.

Now many operate underground, risking repeated ticketing, confiscations, and criminalization, or they folded altogether. A growing number are demanding reform. On November 12, 2025, a coalition including the Street Vendor Project rallied at City Hall, calling on the City Council to adopt the vendor license expansion bill.

But until substantial reform passes, lifting caps, loosening overbearing permit regimes, and providing transparent access to public spaces, little changes.

The Outcome: A De Facto Oligopoly

No, you can’t point to a legal monopoly in New York’s zoning code or antitrust filings. But functionally, yes, the system operates like an oligopoly. A handful of well-capitalized operators run most of the high-visibility food venues. Independent vendors, those 23,000, face systemic barriers, bureaucratic peril, and shrinking space to operate.

Open Streets plus SAPO permit burdens create gated commerce corridors, not open community spaces. Permit caps and moratoriums preserve scarcity. Real estate pressure and capital requirements concentrate access.

The winners are the operators with capital, lawyers, real estate access, and regulatory compliance. The losers are the street-level vendors, often immigrants, often working class.

Why This Matters for the Soul of NYC (and for Brands Like Yours)

For a city that built its identity on scrappy hustle, immigrant enterprise, and street-corner culture, this shift ends something real. The smell of halal carts after midnight. The taco vendor honking at 3 a.m. when diners leave the bars. The corner artist selling prints beside a folding chair. The sound of a street musician busking next to a hot dog stand. That lived authenticity, that chaos, that grassroots energy, is being replaced by sanitized markets, Instagram-ready food halls, and curated vendor lists.

For a brand like yours, building media around “NYC eats,” local food culture, and real community, this transformation is a barrier. The barrier isn’t restaurants, it’s access. The meals people care about aren’t always served in food halls. They’re served from carts, from corner stands, from small vendors who cater to neighborhoods, not tourists.

If we don’t highlight this structural consolidation, the permit caps, the SAPO chokehold, and the rise of operators like Urbanspace, those voices disappear, the history fades, and the city loses another piece of its identity.

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