Tough sell for street vendors
While police ticket sidewalk vendors, supporters say it beats crime as a way to make a buck
Sidewalk sellers face fines, but say it beats crime as a way to earn money.
Danny Guy stands with his shoulders hunched in the shadow of a street awning on Carrall Street in the Downtown Eastside. Amid the boisterous crowd that fills the road between Hastings and Cordova for the DTES’s Sunday street market, Guy is almost unnoticeable. He quietly waits behind his pile of goods, hoping to barter a fair price for a hat or a children’s toy. He shifts slightly from foot to foot as he speaks, softly recollecting how his failed marriage led him from a home in Kamloops to the sidewalks of Vancouver. He says he’s unemployable due to a brain injury, but won’t go into further details. Guy’s unshaven face periodically breaks into a slight smile from beneath a bright red baseball cap, while he talks about his experiences street vending in the neighbourhood.
“I like this. You can talk to people. I’m my own boss, technically,” he says.
However, being your own boss on the streets of Vancouver is not an easy job. Guy has only been in the city for about a year and a half, but he’s already collected a large number of unpaid tickets for illegal vending.
Street vending is only permitted in the DTES at the Sunday street market, which was established by the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood Council as a way to increase the selfsufficiency of people living in the neighbourhood. But since vendors cannot make a living selling goods just once a week, they take their chances selling along Hastings Street when the market isn’t open, risking a $ 250 fine. Even Dave Hamm, the street market’s operations coordinator, has racked up many tickets for illegal street vending.
According to the city’s street vending bylaw, anyone who wants to sell goods on the street needs a permit.
Scott Edwards, who as manager of the city’s street activities branch has the job of reviewing permit applications for vending, said the city does not “encourage people to just set up in front of other businesses and take up sidewalk space” and that individual DTES street vendors would never qualify for permits.
The major concerns, said city Coun. Kerry Jang, are the selling of stolen goods and that street vendors block public access to buildings when they set up on sidewalks. The tickets, he said, are a means to discourage that behaviour.
Hamm said he thinks the bylaw is unfairly enforced in the Downtown Eastside, contravening the principle that the law should be applied equally across the city.
“People in Kerrisdale, Kitsilano — they have garage sales [ and] yard sales. They don’t get tickets,” Hamm said. “We don’t have yards [ or] garages. … We don’t feel that we should be penalized or prosecuted for just trying to look after ourselves.”
Additionally, many vendors deny they steal their merchandise.
Fines can be negotiated
Russ Staniforth, 54, lays out his goods every day beside the entrance to the Commercial-Broadway SkyTrain station, and said he either buys his goods from other vendors or finds them in garbage throughout the city.
On the 15th and the 30th of every month — around the time when people move — Staniforth said he scours apartment blocks for discarded goods.
“If you travelled with me … it would blow your mind what people throw away,” he said, listing shoes, clothing, brand new iPods and other electronics.
Anthony McNab, an artist who has been illegally vending for more than 11 years, said he gets his items from laneways in Vancouver’s west side, where they’ve been thrown out and would otherwise end up in a landfill.
McNab has a long history with tickets. He estimates it takes about a year and a half for vendors with unpaid tickets — like himself and Guy — to receive a “summons notice,” which arrives by mail or is sometimes served in person by a police officer. When summons notices start to show up, they tell the person named to appear in court at a certain time on a particular day. If the person fails to show, an arrest warrant could be issued.
Once a person appears in court, the fine can be negotiated, city bylaw prosecutor Ellen Gerber said in an email.
“Practically speaking, fines are not imposed,” she said. Instead, another remedy is chosen, usually involving community service or, less frequently, imprisonment for not more than six months. If the individual is consistently being brought in for vending, a “no- go” order might be issued, which prohibits a person from going to a specific part of the city.
Most of the no- go orders ban an individual from one block of the DTES for about a year, according to Pivot Legal Society lawyer Doug King. Since many DTES residents stay within five or six blocks for daily living, King said losing one block has a tremendous impact.
Although Jang said prosecuting people lets them know illegal vending is not “acceptable behaviour,” King said the system is like “a revolving door” and “there doesn’t seem to be recognition that [ it] just isn’t working.”
King said vendors in the DTES should be allowed to sell their goods at all times along Hastings Street in order to make a living.
Guy said the consequences of illegal vending will not deter him.
“If I went to jail, then my fines would be paid up and I’d be free to go,” he said. Afterwards, he said, he would “try not to get caught.”
Hamm said illegal vendors cannot do much more than look out for each other on the street.
Vendors will generally set up in groups and at the first sign of a police officer, one will yell “Six!” — the DTES’s code word for cop — prompting everyone to gather up their goods and try to scatter in time.
Fewer tickets issued
Ann Livingston, a social activist who has worked with multiple DTES community organizations, has been fighting bylaw ticketing in the neighbourhood for years. She said ticketing vendors “is cherry picking — it’s really like low- hanging fruit.”
It’s “really, really stupid police work, and it’s not in the spirit of what Vancouverites are paying taxes for,” she said.
However, Vancouver police Const. Lindsey Houghton said that a couple of projects conducted by police have determined street vendors do sometimes sell goods they steal from cars, convenience stores and liquor stores.
But he said the number of tickets issued for street vending has declined dramatically over the past five years, from 79 in 2008 to one as of June this year.
Vendor Staniforth said the majority of cops who pass his street vending station do not give him tickets because they prefer to know he’s making money that way, as opposed to committing more serious crimes to support his heroin addiction.
“I do this because I got tired of doing time in jail. I used to rob banks, I used to do all kinds of not good s---,” he said, noting he now makes enough money from vending to pay for his “over $ 100- a- day” habit.
“I got issues coming out the yingyang, so this is what I do,” he said.
Councillor Jang, in an attempt to find a compromise between allowing street vending and the city’s desire to keep vendors off the sidewalks, developed a proposal for a 24/ 7 street market that would operate in an empty lot in the neighbourhood. If a developer decided to build, he said, the market would simply move to another lot.
But he said the proposal fell through because of the high costs associated with paving and maintaining the lot.
Instead, Jang said he is now focusing on the complaints the city has received regarding the Sunday market, including road closures, the disruption of nearby businesses and people from outside the DTES using the market as an opportunity to hawk stolen goods or stale food.
Although moving the market continues to be debated by the community, for now, Jang said, there is no intention to relocate it.