In New York, and around the country, street vendors are asked to comply with various regulations about their businesses, health, food safety, merchandise, and even cart or stall design.

Standards are important, but in New York there are complaints about over standardization, including problems like inadequate locks and the boring similarity of the stalls.

Street Vendors help make places unique, we cannot hobble them with unrealistic design goals. Not everyone will approve of the "street furniture" merchants use to market their wares, but context matters and if cities INSIST on design standards then cities should also CONSULT with merchants on how to make the standards serve the goals of the city, the public, and the merchant.

Together cities and merchants can identify desirable and important features of vending stalls, features that enhance the business and the neighborhood, both of which are important goals merchants serve when they do business on the street.

Good Day Folks,

The following is adopted from the work of Sean Basinski, the Executive Director of the Street Vending Project in New York City.

Last week Mayor Bloomberg signed into law Intro. 777, legislation spearheaded by the Street Vendor Project in NYC. The SVP was organized to give vendors a voice in that great city.

The new law requires the city to provide interpreters for vendors and other small business owners at the Environmental Control Board, where vendors fight tickets issued by various regulatory authorities. A recent article in Crains New York discusses the bill and the case of Cheikh Fall, a vendor and SVP board member.

For a "Kafka meets John Belushi" look at the what happened before Intro. 777, was signed into law take a look at this transcript http://streetvendor.org/media/pdfs/Munnu%20Dewan%20hearing.pdf of SVP member Munnu Dewan trying to represent himself in a hearing, without an interpreter and with little success. Munnu was ordered to pay a $300 fine.

In short, our diverse society benefits from vendors and merchants, the "third places" they help create, the eyes on the street that they are, but these benefits to the public are not without some costs, costs that are entirely reasonable and commonly born: equal standing before a court.

In April I blogged about an attempt by Los Angeles County to lower the boom on taco truck operators by making them liable for fines up to $1000 for staying in any one spot for more than a hour. http://openair.org/node/416

This week a Los Angeles Superior Court judge invalidated the County's ordinance, finding it unconstitutionally vague. This is not the first time that an ordinance purporting to regulate conduct in public space has been held void for vagueness. In 1972 a Jacksonville, Florida vagrancy ordinance was held to be unconstitutionally vague by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville. That city's vagrancy ordinance provided:

I recently returned from a two week stay in La Paz, Bolivia. I grew up back and forth between the U.S. and Bolivia but it had been over 10 years since my last visit so the difference between my two home countries felt more pronounced than ever. One key difference that will forever resonate with me is the use and definition of public space.

I have been uneasy about the title public space in the U.S. for sometime, but didn’t fully understand why until I returned to Bolivia. One issue is that in the U.S. our public spaces often feel more like leisure space, designed for relaxation, recreation and beauty. We rarely see utilitarian shared spaces as being public. For example, sidewalks and streets are not often considered public as much as shared for the purpose of transporting ourselves to nearby places efficiently. These utilitarian shared spaces, since they are not fully regarded as public, are subject to even greater regulations of use.

The City of Laguna Beach is buying property where a day labor center has been in operation for more than a decade. According to a July 24, 2008 LA Times story, there are no plans by the city to shut down the center, which it has subsidized for several years. The center enjoyed use of the land rent free for years, until the California Department of Transportation ("Cal Trans") discovered that it was the rightful owner and demanded compensation. Laguna Beach then began paying Cal Trans $420 a month in rent. Now the city is ponying up $18,000 to buy it lock, stock, and barrel.

In the grand scheme of things, that's not a lot of money. But one can't help but wonder if these costs could have been avoided if the city had chosen simply to designate a stretch of sidewalk or roadside as an appropriate place for soliciting day labor work and nothing more. Building a center undoubtedly attracted the attention of the state.