LA joins other big cities in legalizing street vending
LOS ANGELES — It was his 63rd birthday but instead of staying home to celebrate Wednesday, Andres Garcia got in his truck and drove 25 miles to Los Angeles City Hall to see the little sidewalk vending business he’s run for 15 years finally become legal.
There, in the ornate City Council Chambers, he and more than 200 other sidewalk vendors — “micro-entrepreneurs” as Councilman Curren Price Jr. calls them — rose up to cheer, embrace one another and shout in Spanish, “we won, we won,” as the council voted 13-0 to legalize street vending in the nation’s second-largest city.
“For us, it’s very important,” Garcia said of the LA street vendors whose numbers have been estimated as high as 50,000. “If someone complains, the police, they could come in and take everything from us. Make us throw all our stuff away and we lose all our money for that day.”
In recent years, police have often looked the other way, he said, but he has been hassled more than once in the past when somebody complained that he stakes out space to sell chips, candy, drinks and other items in Hansen Dam Park, a popular recreational area in the farthest northeast corner of the city’s San Fernando Valley.
Passage of the ordinance takes away that risk but marks just the beginning of a new day for street vendors. The city must still implement a system for issuing permits to vendors and to figure out how much to charge for them.
“We need to make sure that these permits don’t cost so much that they’re burdensome for the vendors,” Councilman Bob Blumenfield said.
At the same time, he and other officials added, the price must cover the cost of issuing and enforcing the permits.
Price says it will likely be a year before those details are hammered out and voted on. Leaders of the Los Angeles Street Vendor Campaign and other advocacy groups plan to take part in the discussion.
Los Angeles will join New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia and other metropolises in regulating street vendors who sell everything from toys to tacos, T-shirts to cellphones and just about anything else you can think of.