Street Vendor Treasures

“There’s a woman who sells these tea cakes on Canal St,” Sean Basinski, 36, said of his favorite New York City street vendor. “They are ten for a dollar and really warm up your day.”

Treasures like this woman's tea cakes are what Basinski seeks to preserve with his Street Vendors Project, an initiative to change the image of the street vendor by cultivating and organizing street vendors.

The Street Vendor Project focuses on a few goals – increasing the number of permits for street vendors, opening up more streets, reducing fines for minor violations, and smoothing the relation between law enforcement and the street vendors.

“It’s sort of like a union. We believe in collective action,” Basinski said. “Our adversary is the city.”

According to the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, who issues the licenses, there are 853 licenses for those who sell non-food products and there are 3,000 licenses for food vendors. These permits are capped, meaning the waitlist for permits is increasingly long and has resulted in a black market for permits.

According to Basinski, it is completely legal for an owner to have someone else work their booth, which makes it close to impossible for law enforcement to crack down on those who have sold their permits.

Basinski hopes that by increasing the number of permits available, this injustice of black market sales will end.

Currently, a lot of street vendors are prohibited from operating in certain areas. According to Basinski, lot of businesses have helped put laws into action that have decreased the street areas open to vendors. His project would like to see this reversed and create more space for vendors.

The fines that the street vendors face are also a huge problem, according to Baskinski. It is $50 for the first offense and $1,000 for the sixth offense. These fines can really start to add up and hinder the profits of the vendors.

“There are all kinds of little rules,” Basinski said. “You have to be 20 feet from an entrance to a building, 10 feet from a cross walk, etc.”

The Street Vendor Project also seeks to smooth out the relationship between the police force and the vendors. Basinski believes the vendors should be more thoroughly taught the rules and the law enforcement should be informed of why some of the rules are commonly broken.

“It’s a huge waste of police force to have people trying to work treated like criminals,” said Basinski.

Basinski hopes that under his leadership these goals can be worked on in the Street Vendor Project. And how does he know so much about the problems facing street vendors?

“I sold burritos at Park and 52nd St,” admitted Basinski.