Community Essay : ‘Not a Single Vendor Has a License’ : * Los Angeles’ effort to set up a permanent legal vending district along the lines of Olvera Street is too small in size and vision.

Street vendors, like day laborers, pirate taxi drivers, long distance raiteros (passenger carriers) and barrio house kitchens are part of the informal economy that has grown in Los Angeles because of unemployment and large-scale immigration. It is a socioeconomic phenomenon no different than what is found in Mexico City or any other megalopolis in Latin America.

In January, 1994, the Los Angeles City Council approved a two-year measure to develop regulations for street vendors and set up eight special districts where such vending, which primarily serves immigrant Latino communities, would be legal. With the temporary ordinance nearing expiration, the City Council last week approved one tiny permanent special district offering only 38 legal spaces. The estimated 10,000 active sidewalk vendors in Los Angeles are rightly disappointed.

Not a single vendor now working the streets of the city has a license to sell her products, which include hot foods, fruit, clothing, jewelry and even tools. Most experts agree that the 1994 vending law was too bureaucratic, that licenses were too costly and that the majority of street vendors were excluded because they sold hot food cooked at the site, which was banned.

As for the new district, in the vicinity of MacArthur Park just west of Downtown, City Councilman Mike Hernandez tries to put a good face on it. “We’re going to change the image we have of street vendors in Los Angeles,” he says, and “this area [McArthur Park] is going to be another Olvera Street.”

But both the size of the district and the vision behind its approval are far too narrow. The 6th Street/Union Avenue zone, with more than 100 vendors, is only three blocks from MacArthur Park but was left out of the approved district. So was the Pico corridor, with at least 250 active vendors serving a largely immigrant Latino community. As for vision, the concept of another folkloric tourist attraction around the park is an excellent one. It can be a positive contrast to the criminal element that prowls this once beautiful site. But to present this as the solution to street vending is ludicrous.

Street vendors could be encouraged to sell Olvera-type craft items, but supply and demand, not a subjective bureaucratic decision, should rule.

Unfortunately, the approved district also comes with an explicit promise by the Los Angeles Police Department to clean up the rest of the unlicensed vendors from the area. Vendors are no strangers to police abuse. Soon after the 1994 sidewalk vending ordinance was approved by the City Council, the LAPD began a citywide crackdown. This campaign of harassment lasted 4 1/2. In that period the police issued 825 citations against vendors in comparison to 952 for all of 1993. The calculated police effort, accompanied by continuous raids, confiscations and arrests, undermined vendors economically and eroded their efforts to implement the special districts mandated by the vending ordinance.

Today, the police again have a green light to go after the street sellers. On Nov. 8, they began ticketing and removing vendors at MacArthur Park. Vendors on the Eastside, the most militant in the city, felt the crackdown with intensified detentions, citations and removals. At least five people heard a senior officer in the Hollenbeck Division say to a vendor during another sweep on Nov. 10, “You stupid Mexican, you can’t even speak English.”

The City Council will soon be conducting hearings on the broader future of the sidewalk vending ordinance, so there’s still hope. The Council should design less costly, less bureaucratic and more equitable legislation. The new effort should of course satisfy the concerns of respected merchants and residents and still protect and grandfather in the vendors now actively working the streets of the city. A more aggressive, imaginative approach, including a minimum of reasonable standards and licensing requirements, would reduce social tensions as well as empower vendors.