Today’s Topic

In cities across the nation, street vendors--those entrepreneurs who hawk everything from hot dogs and ice cream to T-shirts and “solid gold” watches--turn ordinary streets into often colorful outdoor bazaars.

Of course, a lot of people prefer to keep their streets ordinary. They complain that the vendors block sidewalks, dump trash and take business away from store and property owners, all the while not paying taxes.

No matter what you think of street peddling, selling merchandise from a cart is about as American as, well, hot dogs and ice cream. For many immigrants, it is the first shot at the American dream.

That shot did not legally exist in Los Angeles until January, when the City Council finally met the demands of a coalition of groups--many of them minorities--tired of being penalized for peddling their wares.

The decision to create eight districts where newly licensed vendors could sell their merchandise has created its own set of problems. In today’s Platform, street vendors, city officials and businessmen discuss the logistics of legalizing street sales.

In fact, if the experiences of other large American cities is any measure, regulating street vending will not be a panacea.

Take New York City, where “street vending is part of the landscape,” according to Marc Wurzel of the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs.

“We’ve lost 400,000 jobs in the past five years and that’s affecting small business owners,” Wurzel says. “We’re confronted with the problem of making sure vendors have their opportunities but also recognizing we can’t close our eyes or ears to the calls of small business owners.”

As a result, Wurzel says, the city has been locked in an endless cycle of cracking down on the thousands of illegal street vendors, only to be forced back in a corner by the inevitable uproar that follows.

Regulating street vendors--making sure they are licensed, keeping them in designated areas, ensuring that they contribute to the tax base--is a challenge for every city. Yet, every city tries a different method, none of them guaranteed.

In Chicago, vendors are prohibited from selling any food that must be prepared or cooked and, in some wards, vendors are banned altogether. “There are frequently violations of that,” says John Holden, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Revenue.

“You get fly-by-night merchants coming by with food carts so, just in the last couple of years, there has been a growing trend to restrict the activities of peddlers,” Holden says.

Regulations aside, street vendors are not likely to disappear any time soon. “My own view is that street vending is perfectly acceptable and should be encouraged,” says Alfred E. Osborne, Jr., director of the entrepreneurial studies center at UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management.

Adds Osborne: “It’s a way for someone without skills to earn a living on their way up and to be socialized into a society.”