Street Vendors--In Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Francisco Flores stood next to the Christmas cards and cockroach poison he was selling on a sidewalk near downtown Los Angeles.

“I’d love to have a job,” the 25-year-old native of El Salvador said. But he said that as an illegal alien who does not qualify for amnesty, he cannot work legally.

“I can’t sit with my arms crossed,” Flores said, “or I won’t have money to pay my rent or to eat.”

Street vending is against the law in Los Angeles, and the vendors, who number an estimated 2,000 in the city, have increasingly angered merchants on thoroughfares such as Olvera Street and Broadway, where many sell their wares.

At Clifton’s Cafeteria, a Broadway fixture since 1933, manager John Lennon said, “I don’t think it’s fair for somebody to do business on the street while everybody else has to get licenses and pay taxes.”

On Olvera Street, where priests last summer proclaimed the area around Our Lady Queen of Angels Church a “safe zone” for vendors to protect them from arrest, merchants say their businesses have suffered from the competition.

“People are torn because there’s a philosophical good being done,” said Vivien Bonzo, head of the merchants’ group there. “But charity should happen in a way that does not affect others.”

Eludes Solution

The dispute, along with more than 1,500 arrests for street vending in the downtown area alone since early 1987, has been a problem that seemed to elude solution.

However, in recent weeks the city has held hearings and other meetings in an effort to solve it. Deputy Mayor Grace Davis said a change in the city ordinance is likely “within six months,” with vendors permitted but regulated. “I think the city needs to look at this,” Davis said this week.

A spokesman for Councilman Mike Woo said he is considering proposing the change to the City Council.

In late November, the Los Angeles Police Commission and the Board of Public Works held a special joint hearing, attended by merchants, vendors, police and advocates for Central American refugees, who are believed to compose the majority of the vendors.

Last week, the issue was discussed further at a City Hall meeting held by Davis and attended by Talcott, police officials and members of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Central American Refugees.

“We’re trying to strike a balance between the two groups,” said Police Commission President Robert Talcott.

“Right now the law says there can be no street vending,” Davis said, “but my feeling is these people have no alternative.”

Many of the aliens cannot get jobs legally, refugee advocates say, because to qualify for amnesty, an alien must have been living here before 1982. Most of the Central Americans came later.167772161 “So what we’re seeing in the streets in Central Los Angeles is a dramatic increase in street vending,” said Madeline Janis, an attorney who volunteers her time to help the vendors.

“The Los Angeles regulations are outdated and not appropriate to cope with the present situation,” said Raiko Habe, a USC assistant professor of urban and regional planning who has done a study of street vending laws and practices in 30 U.S. cities.

Cities have a better chance at controlling street vendors if they permit them, she said. “Prohibition is totally unrealistic, considering how many people are doing it anyway.”

Cities such as Baltimore, Honolulu and Washington provide controls through licensing, or regulating the times, locations and merchandise that can be sold on the street, Habe said.

The vendors, meanwhile, have formed a group called the Assn. of Ambulatory Street Vendors, of which Flores is a leader. About 200 vendors are members, he said, and about 60 come to biweekly meetings held at the Central American Refugee Center, which supports their efforts.

The vendor group is trying to press for changes in the law that would legalize street selling. They are also fighting what Flores calls “problems with repression,” meaning arrests and police behavior.

Janis said refugee advocates have heard several examples of “aggressively harsh enforcement,” such as confiscation of goods, strip searches or use of racial slurs.

“We asked for specifics,” said Los Angeles Police Capt. Jerry W. Conner, commanding officer for the Central Division. “No one had any specifics.”

Merchandise is confiscated for evidence in misdemeanor arrests for vending, Conner said, and he noted, “That’s not misconduct.”

Conner said vending is not a high priority problem in his division, citing the presence of homeless people and motor vehicle thefts as larger problems. His officers respond to street vending, he said, only when merchants complain, when sidewalk traffic is impeded or when vendors are selling bootleg cassette tapes.

“We don’t devote a lot of resources to the vendors,” he said, noting that one to six officers might be assigned to it on a given day. “Vending really is a non-issue.”

Advocates for the vendors, however, maintain that any such law enforcement is misplaced. “This is not a criminal justice problem,” Janis said, “It is a business regulation problem.”