Street vendors in New York City won historic reforms in the City Council after decades of harsh criminalization thanks to the advocacy led by the vendors of the Street Vendor Project. The Street Vendor Reform package does a lot: it removes the cap on permits and licenses by allowing the city to grant 10,700 new general vending licenses in 2027 and adding 2,200 supervisory licenses for food vendors every year until 2031. Despite fierce opposition from the business community throughout NYC, the bill passed with some compromises, including requirements for vendors to maintain cleanliness and a three-strike system for accountability. One of the most novel pieces of the bill is the creation of a Division of Street Vendor Assistance within the Department of Small Business Services, providing long-overdue enforcement coordination, education, and support to vendors. This major victory reflects a balanced approach to reforming the street vendor system in New York City.
The package of bills represents a historic breakthrough: New York City has not issued new general street vending licenses since 1979. The new legislation will help vendors support their families, care for their children, and build the careers they have worked hard to sustain.
Aminata Volta, who received her general vendor license in January after almost a decade on the waitlist said, “I almost fainted. I called everybody to tell them about it.” Like the vast majority of vendors, Volta is an immigrant; she arrived from Burkina Faso in 1987 and sells handmade jewelry and accessories in Harlem. The power of this moment is reflected through the impact that this will have on the lives of tens of thousands of New Yorkers who have waited years for permits. Volta enthused, “I can’t wait for the other vendors to get their permits. The joy — I want them to feel the same joy.”
The streets of New York City are iconic, in part, because of street vendors – the entrepreneurs who range from people with a small side-hustle to long-established small business owners energizing the city blocks. These vendors are a staple of life in the city. But, for decades, New York’s unsustainably low caps on city-issued licenses and permits meant endless problems for street vendors. When operating without the required permit or license, the city’s smallest business owners are subject to fines, arrest, and property confiscation. Adding to these longstanding challenges, aggressive ICE actions have become an added threat to these vulnerable vendors.
The Street Vendor Project (SVP) was founded in 2001 to organize vendors and currently has 3,000 members. SVP spent years lobbying the City Council to pass bills to support vendors, efforts that over the years have resulted in laws about access to bathrooms for vendors, reducing harassment from the police, and navigating city requirements about electrification of food carts. But for years, the biggest issue on the agenda was lifting the restrictively low cap on licenses and permits.
Research that Supports Advocacy
When SVP pushed legislators to lift the cap on vendors, the inevitable question was, “How many vendors will want licenses and permits if we make this change?” There was, however, no reliable information about the number of vendors. Without data on who street vendors were, SVP’s advocacy aims had a hard time gaining traction.
That’s when the Immigration Research Initiative, together with partners at the Community Service Society, stepped in to support. IRI had worked closely with SVP on the Excluded Worker Campaign, establishing a basis of mutual trust. The project had an enormous amount of raw data from surveys they conducted during the pandemic; they asked whether we could analyze the data and turn it into a report. The survey had a rich and varied group of over 2,000 respondents, by far the biggest sample we have seen of street vendors, and was administered in English, Spanish, Bangla, Wolof, Arabic, Mandarin, French, Cantonese, and Tibetan.
Even with this rich sample, it was a challenge to know the overall number of vendors. That’s where we turned to a statistician from the George Mason University, Dr. Jonathan Auerbach. He worked with us to develop a methodology to estimate the number of street vendors in New York City, and to provide a profile of who these vendors are. You can read Professor Auerbach’s full analysis in his paper, “Estimating the Number of Street Vendors in New York City”.
IRI’s 2024 report, Street Vendors of New York, provided empirically grounded data that helped in the advocacy efforts by painting a clearer picture of who street vendors are and how they live and work. Prior to this study, little was known about this group of entrepreneurs who are a visible yet often misunderstood part of the city’s economy. This research helped document the realities of street vending and the essential role vendors play in New York City life.
Our findings show that approximately 23,000 street vendors operate across New York City’s five boroughs. The vast majority, 96 percent, are immigrants, and nearly 81 percent rely on vending as their primary source of income. These are demanding jobs, often performed outdoors, with far less security than work afforded to those employed indoors. These challenges have only intensified in recent years. Protecting and supporting street vendors means standing up for a workforce that is a staple of New York City’s economy, culture, and daily life.
Carina Kaufman-Gutierrez, for years the Deputy Director of the Street Vendor Project at the Urban Justice Center, and now the executive director of the city’s newly created office of Street Vendor Services, explained why the data matters. Having an empirically grounded analysis, she said, “illuminated the critical gap in services and licensing to existing street vendors, and became the seminal study on street vending used to form the Street Vendor Reform Package.”
One of the joys of our work at the Immigration Research Initiative is watching how the stories the data tells travel beyond the page and shape conversations in our city and across the country. For just over eight months, findings from this report were featured in the Museum of the City of New York’s exhibit on street vendors. David Kallick wrote about it here. And a documentary film is in production, Vendor Power: Behind the Carts of NYC, featuring our partners at the Street Vendor Project and highlighting vendors’ lived experiences. We are delighted to see this report used to share stories, inform legislation, and make it easier for vendors to run their businesses.