Letter to Mayor de Blasio re: Vending

re: Street Vendor Modernization Act (Intro #1303) July 9, 2018
Dear Mayor de Blasio,
You proudly claim to be a pro-immigrant liberal.
Yet, according to a recent NY Post story, you want to revive a discredited and corrupt vending proposal, originally sponsored by former NYC Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito, that would do tremendous harm to all NYC vendors, particularly to immigrant vendors. This plan was originally known as Intro #1303.

From: the NY Post July 4, 2018 - De Blasio aims to revive plan adding thousands more food cart permits
“Perhaps the city should start thinking about congestion pricing for sidewalks [i.e. selling off all vending spots to the highest bidder]. Mayor Bill de Blasio says he wants to revive a plan to add more than 3,000 street food cart permits over the next decade and is “hopeful” he and the City Council can reach a deal this year...“We were very, very close last December with the last City Council,” de Blasio told a town hall audience on the Upper West Side last week. “It didn’t get there. There was a disagreement at the end, and it fell apart.”

On the surface, Intro #1303 pretended to be about helping immigrant vendors by making food vending permits more accessible. The reality is that this fake “vending reform” bill was written to help the BIDs and a single food vending corporation, MOVE Systems, to privatize vending throughout NYC.

The bill was so blatantly corrupt and out of touch with reality that your own city agencies (NYPD, Department of Health, DOT, and DCA) all testified against it, as did all the Community Boards and every vendor advocacy group in NYC, apart from one, The Street Vendor Project (SVP). SVP is a front organization funded by the City Council. Over the years it has done great harm to vendors.

Intro #1303's original co-sponsor, Councilmember Mark Levine, eventually withdrew his name from the bill. The Consumer Affairs Committee refused to OK it despite the Speaker desperately trying to pass it right up until to her final day in office.

While the bill pretended to have, “something for everybody” in reality, it had nothing for anyone, other than for MOVE Systems, which had numerous ties, financial and otherwise, to Speaker Viverito. The City Council was never, “very, very close” to passing that bill.

The barely hidden agenda behind Intro 1303 was to create thousands of new food vending permits and then issue them to recent immigrants so that their permits could then be sold to MOVE Systems; a corporation run by billionaires that works closely with the BIDs. The BIDs demanded that the bill be rewritten so as to give themselves complete control over all vending via the “Street Vendor Review Panel.” That's like putting I.C.E. In charge of writing all immigrant policies.

If the BIDs and SVP are now “hopeful” about you supporting this bill (as the Post reports), that means you intend to treacherously sell out the City's vendors. Is that your “liberal pro-immigrant” policy in action?
Assuming that your recent about face on this issue is due to you being given totally misleading advice by aides, the SVP and BID lobbists, rather than that you are blatantly lying to the public in grand Trumpian style, allow me to briefly describe what's wrong with the entire proposal.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, NYC has been at war with immigrant vendors. Every proposed vending bill since that time has been about significantly reducing the number of vendors and making vending as difficult as possible.

BIDs have a long history of racism and xenophobia, beginning in 1907 with the founding of the Fifth Avenue Association, which was formed to eliminate immigrant Jewish street peddlers from Midtown Manhattan. All the new BIDs were likewise formed in order to eliminate subsequent waves of immigrant vendors from their districts. Today, it's Muslim, African, Asian and Latin American immigrants that are primarily being targeted, rather than Jews.

The BIDs you are now back-room negotiating with “on behalf” of these immigrant vendors were created for the purpose of eliminating these same vendors. Pretending that issuing thousands of new permits to immigrant vendors could settle the BIDs' ongoing war against those vendors, is an absurd con game. One might call it, Fake News.

All Intro #1303 will have accomplished if passed would be the privatization of all vending (i.e. the selling off of all vending spots); an agenda the BIDs have been pushing for decades.

The bill would not help immigrant vendors at all; instead, it would drive them from the streets. A permit to vend is useless if you have to buy a vending space that's as expensive as renting a store, i.e. “congestion pricing.” How are poor immigrant vendors supposed to buy a desirable sidewalk location from the local BID when less desirable vending concessions in NYC Parks sell for as much as $250,000 for a single space?
The Bryant Park BID has already begun illegally selling sidewalk vending spaces to MOVE Systems carts with the Nathan's logo. All of the City's 75 BIDs are hoping to get in on this lucrative action and apply it to all forms of vending.

With very few exceptions the thousands of immigrant vendors currently working in concession carts in NYC Parks are minimum wage employees of vending corporations, not vendor entrepreneurs. Bringing this serf-like system to the streets would do far more harm than good to the City's many thousands of immigrant vendors. It would destroy the last remaining vestige left in NYC of the “American Dream.” Is that what you are “hopeful” about doing?

How about the many Community Boards representing your constituents, who also without exception testified against this bill? Would creating thousands of new food vendors, whether corporate owned or independent, do anything to help the co-op residents who frantically call the police when even a single food vendor sets up on their block?

Let's pretend for a moment that NY City officials actually wanted to make vending easier and more accesible for immigrants, while satisfying the landlords, stores, restaurants and BIDs who oppose vending.
Which kind of vendors would be most desirable for the City to encourage; food vendors, who generate smoke, tons of edible garbage and trash, take up twice the space of other vendors, use flammable compressed gas, occupy valuable parking spaces all day and directly compete with the City's thousands of restaurants, groceries and take out stores OR, artists, book vendors and veteran vendors who leave no trash, produce no food for rats, generate no smoke or pollution, can't blow up, and generally do not compete with any of the stores they set up near?

Far more immigrant vendors sell art, books, crafts and general merchandise than food, yet the City mercilessly persecutes these vendors day and night. In fact, many of the sponsors of Intro #1303 are among the most aggressive persecutors of vendors in City Council history. These hypocrite legislators have been the very City officials demanding that the NYPD summons and arrest the immigrant vendors they've been pretending to “help.”

If NYC officials really wanted to reform the present corrupt system of food vending, why not give all food cart permits to the thousands of veterans and disabled veterans who are already legally entitled to these permits and who in many cases have spent years on waiting lists? If, as city officials testified during the Intro #1303 hearing, at least half of the 20,000 food vending carts now on the streets are part of an illegal black market, why not use your city agencies to deal with that directly rather than create thousands of new illegal food vendors?

So far your administration has done nothing to help any vendors. Instead, it has continued the previous Mayor's policies of violating the established legal rights of street artists, veteran vendors, and food vendors throughout the City's streets and parks. As a vendor advocate I ask you to do the one thing for vendors that is entirely in your own power to accomplish; do nothing more to harm us.

You have publicly positioned yourself as the anti-Trump. By supporting any version of The Street Vendor Modernization Act you are engaging in exactly the kind of con job the President specializes in. Exploiting immigrant vendors in order to destroy independent vending on behalf of the BIDs and vending corporations is a strategy Trump himself would gladly claim credit for.

If you actually want to help immigrant vendors, it's easy. Order the NYPD to only summons vendors when there is an objective public safety or public health issue, rather than constantly harassing and persecuting them every time a BID manager makes a phone call. Compared to your obstructing Federal agencies, simply easing off on the endless and often illegal harassment and persecution of immigrant vendors is both lawful and easy.

On the other hand, if you are now in fact a vendor persecutor yourself, how about doing it honestly, the way Mayor Giuliani did. Instead of calling it the, “Street Vendor Modernization Act,” call it what it actually is, the “Destroy Immigrant Vendors and Privatize All Vending Spots On Behalf of the BIDs Act.” Then the BIDs, the Community Boards, the street Vendor Project and the President himself will wildly applaud your efforts.

Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
artistpres@gmail.com
For a full archive of all articles on Intro #1303 see:
https://www.facebook.com/stopintro1303/