Crackdown and falling down

If you’re engaged in one type of illegal vending in New York, the odds are rising sharply that you’ll be at the business end of a police-led crackdown. If you’re engaged in another type of illegal vending, government has largely stepped on its own feet for months or years — with state and city officials, after endless false starts, only finally now coalescing around a plan that may or may not work.

The first type of illegal vending we refer to are food carts and trucks that shovel out fully legal sustenance to locals, commuters and tourists alike. Over many years, there’s been a painful mismatch between demand for permits and their supply, with many unlicensed street vendors hawking everything from churros to fruit to consumer goods on subways and platforms and sidewalks.

Back in 2021, the city supposedly struck a grand bargain to increase the number of permits while increasing enforcement — enforcement that was supposed to prioritize civil over criminal enforcement. But rather than up the number of licenses by 445 each year starting in 2022, a paltry 50 new licenses had been issued as of December, the online news outlet The City reports.

That’s not all. While failing to release the number of licenses it’s supposed to, the city is ramping up criminal enforcement against vendors — issuing more than 1,200 criminal summonses last year, six times the number handed out in 2019.

We’re not saying New York ought to look the other way while unlicensed vending explodes. It’s a real problem for licensed vendors and for brick-and-mortar vendors, both of whom pay hefty overhead for the right to sell goods here. And it’s potentially a problem for public health, as only legal vendors get inspected by the city.

But we’re skeptical criminal court is the right place to hash out most of these violations — and we can’t help point out the glaring disconnect between people who quietly sell mangos and candy and those who sell illegally cannabis out of rapidly proliferating storefronts and vans.

Illegal cannabis storefronts, of which there are thousands of them everywhere: near one another, near schools and day cares. And they’re not abiding by any of the rigid rules on product quality or marketing that constrain the tiny handful of legal cannabis stores that have managed to open to this point. In fact, they’re able to undercut the legals on price, which gives them an innate advantage. If all that weren’t bad enough, they’ve seemed to be magnets for armed robbery.

Yet New York City has cycled through high-profile attempt after attempt to crack down on them. A year ago, Mayor Adams stood with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and pledged, “we’re not going to take two steps back by letting illegal smoke shops take over this emerging market.” Almost nothing changed on the ground.

The latest round of promises come from Albany, where Gov. Hochul pledges to give cities more power to crack down on the illicit shops, while relaxing taxes on the legal ones so they have a fairer shot to compete.

May this umpteenth attempt make an actual difference in the real world. And may the city finally begin to resolve its two-faced reaction to those who sell things illegally on its streets.