Who Owns the Streets?: Broken Windows Policing and the Criminalization of Street Vendors in New York City

Introduction

Intrinsically woven into the fabric of New York City are the street vendors who feed and create the vibrant culture of the city. From halal carts to the women selling tamales and fruit cups, street vendors are among the most visible representations of the city’s immigrant identity. Yet despite their cultural and economic significance, street vendors are routinely excluded from policy conversations that directly impact their liberty and livelihood. Since the 1800s, immigrant populations have relied on street vending as an entry point into economic stability, particularly when formal employment pathways were inaccessible due to language barriers, immigration status, or lack of capital (Ferrara 2024).

NYC celebrates its diversity through food, small businesses, and entrepreneurship, but this celebration remains deeply contradictory. While vendors contribute over $190 million in wages, $290 million in goods and services, and more than $71 million in tax revenue to the city annually, municipal agencies continue to treat them as public nuisances rather than as legitimate small business owners (Chatterjee 2025). This contradiction raises a fundamental question: Who owns public space in NYC, and whose labor is allowed to exist within it?

Street vendors operate at the intersection of public space, immigration, labor, and policing. They are some of the smallest of the small businesses that contribute to NYC’s economy, but their industry is subjected to government oversight like no other. Unlike other small businesses, vending is regulated through an unusually punitive and fragmented system involving multiple city agencies with overlapping jurisdictions. Despite involving excessive regulatory bodies, vending enforcement is arbitrary due to a lack of explicit street vending laws. For example, a street vendor cannot have their stand less than 10 feet from a crosswalk or subway entrance, and stands must be 18 inches from the curb, along with carts no larger than 8 feet by 3 feet with no boxes placed next to them or poking out from underneath (Street Vending Regulations). These rules can be hard to navigate, especially when you combine strict measurements with constantly changing street conditions. Street vendors are almost always literal inches away from risking fines or confiscations. As one vendor told journalist Haidee Chu, “They’ll write tickets about anything—they’ll find a thing to write a ticket for” (Chu 2025).

This enforcement-heavy approach is not accidental, but is rooted in decades-old “quality of life” policing and the broken windows theory, which portray informal economic activity as disorderly and threatening to urban structures. Rather than regulating street vending as a legitimate form of work, the city has relied on fines, confiscations, and arrests as tools to criminalize survival rather than address regulatory challenges. These practices disproportionately target low-income immigrant workers, many of whom already face linguistic, legal, and economic vulnerability.

A street vendor reform bill was passed in January 2026 with a supermajority from NYC council members after Mayor Eric Adams vetoed the bill in 2025. This bill addresses numerous issues by creating an Office of Street Vendors and increasing vendor permits, yet it still fails to address the public support for language accessibility and the issue of double enforcement, both of which are root causes behind the policy failure surrounding vendors (Settle 2026).¹

This paper argues that NYC’s current street vending system systematically criminalizes immigrant labor through arbitrary permit caps, fragmented governance, punitive enforcement, and failure to provide meaningful language access. Rather than resolving public space concerns, these policies push vendors into informality while deepening economic precarity. To realign city policy with its stated values of equity and inclusion, NYC must decriminalize street vending by lifting the cap on vending permits, centralizing oversight under a dedicated Street Vendor Department, embedding language justice into all aspects of regulation and enforcement, and replacing punishment-first approaches with education-based compliance strategies.

Background

Street vending has existed in NYC since its earliest days as a port of immigration and commerce. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pushcart vending was a vital part of working-class immigrant economies, particularly for Jewish, Italian, and Caribbean communities. Attempts to address structural issues around street vending have been limited and largely ineffective. In 2021, the city council passed Local Law 18, which was intended to gradually lift the permit cap by issuing 445 new permits annually over a decade. However, implementation has been incredibly slow due to a lack of staffing, backlog issues, and a lack of enforcement (Parra 2025). This shows that issuing new permits under a strict cap does little to solve the problem; instead it continues to criminalize the vendors left without access. The arbitrary cap on licenses forces the remaining 23,000 street vendors to operate “illegally,” since the system refuses to legitimize them. Inevitably, this makes an already marginalized community of low-income immigrant workers vulnerable to overpolicing of the city costing up to $5,000, confiscation of their goods, and harassment, effectively criminalizing their livelihood (Chu 2024). Vendors are required to show up at court for their summons to defend their right to make a living and fight off fines that they couldn’t afford to pay. Since almost 96 percent of street vendors are immigrants, there’s an added risk to their safety as they fear deportation due to the rise in immigration raids (IRI 2024).

Compounding these issues is the city’s failure to accommodate the linguistic realities of its vendor population. Despite being one of the most linguistically diverse cities in the world, NYC does not accommodate language needs in its enforcement and licensing systems for street vendors. More than 55 percent of vendors report limited English proficiency, with many speaking Spanish, Bengali, Mandarin, Arabic, or Urdu as their primary language (IRI 2024). Yet when vendors are required to interact with agencies like the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) or the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), they encounter bureaucracy that assumes English fluency at every step, from permit application to retrieving confiscated merchandise. This sentiment was shared among many vendors at a membership meeting at Street Vendors Project (SVP), a nonprofit organization that offers language support, legal aid, and advocacy for the street vendors of NYC.

As a volunteer with SVP since 2022, I have witnessed vendors repeatedly describe feeling invisible within systems meant to serve them. One vendor recounted standing helplessly as officers issued summons in English, unable to understand any of the paperwork placed in front of them. Another described losing their whole inventory because they were told to return with forms they couldn’t even identify, let alone fill out. This lack of language accessibility is not just an inconvenience—it’s a structural barrier that determines whether a vendor can operate “legally” or whether they will be pushed into vulnerability. Even when translation is available, it’s often limited to automated or partial translations online, not real-time interpretation during crucial interactions of confiscation disputes. When a vendor’s merchandise or cart is seized by DSNY, they are directed to retrieve it from a storage facility. Many vendors testified that when they arrive, they cannot understand the paperwork required to reclaim their property. As a result, their goods, often worth hundreds of dollars, are permanently lost. This gap in language accessibility stands in contradiction to NYC’s celebrated reputation as a “city of immigrants,” as it fails to provide linguistic support to the immigrant entrepreneurs who make its streets vibrant.

Policy Analysis

NYC’s approach to street vending is built on an enforcement-first logic that criminalizes survival rather than regulating it. Fines, confiscations, and court summonses are framed as deterrents, yet they fail to address the underlying structural barriers that prevent compliance in the first place. When permits are unavailable, regulations are unclear, and language access is nonexistent, enforcement does not promote order: It deepens the informality. The current approach clearly has structural disregard for immigrant workers embedded within the city’s vending regime, which is in urgent need of addressing.

As seen in Figure 1, the fragmentation of authority across multiple agencies further exacerbates this problem. Vendors may face “double enforcement,” meaning they receive citations from DCWP, DSNY, and even the NYPD for the same alleged violation. This lack of coordination fosters confusion and distrust, discouraging vendors from engaging with formal systems they perceive as arbitrary and punitive. In addition, the consequences for vendors are severe: A single confiscation can erase an entire week’s income. Repeated fines, missed workdays due to court appearances, and ongoing harassment compound financial instability. In a 2024 CBS New York report, a Bronx vendor described losing his home after repeated confiscations prevented him from earning enough to pay mounting DSNY fines. He ultimately began living in a storage unit with no heat, water, or bathroom, illustrating how enforcement can trigger cascading collapse rather than compliance (Bedrosian 2024).

The city itself also bears the cost of this dysfunction. By pushing vendors into the informal economy, New York forfeits millions in potential permit fees, sales tax revenue, and reinvestment, which are estimated to exceed a combined $60 million annually (Mosher and Turnquist 2024). Enforcement also drains public resources that could instead be directed toward vendor education, sanitation support, and compliance programs that actually reduce complaints and improve public space conditions. Despite these costs, political resistance persists, fueled by narratives portraying vendors as obstructions or competitors rather than contributors. This framing obscures the reality that street vending is not the problem, but policy failure is.

Policy Proposals

To address these systemic failures, NYC must fundamentally reimagine how it governs street vending. If the goals are safety, cleanliness, and economic vitality, enforcement alone cannot achieve them. The following policy proposals offer a pathway toward decriminalization, inclusion, and effective regulation.

Lift the Cap on Street Vending Permits Entirely:

The cap on street vending permits must be eliminated rather than incrementally expanded. The decades-old cap has created an artificial scarcity that bears no relationship to actual street capacity, public safety, or sanitation needs. By limiting the number of legal permits while allowing demand for vending to grow, the city has manufactured illegality, forcing tens of thousands of vendors to operate without licenses through no fault of their own. This scarcity has also produced a black market in which permits are rented or sold at exorbitant prices, leaving vendors vulnerable to exploitation and debt while eroding trust in public institutions (Crowley 2025). Lifting the cap would immediately reduce this underground market, restore faith in fair governance, and allow vendors to operate openly within the formal economy. Rather than criminalizing vendors for lacking permits that do not exist, the city should focus on regulating vending through clear standards tied to safety, sanitation, and accessibility. Removing the cap would allow the city to collect permit fees, sales taxes, and reinvestment revenue while reducing enforcement costs tied to policing unlicensed activity.

Establish a Dedicated Street Vendor Department:

NYC should establish a centralized Street Vendor Department (SVD) responsible for all aspects of street vending governance, including licensing, enforcement coordination, education, and data transparency. Currently, vendors must navigate overlapping and often contradictory requirements across multiple agencies such as DCWP, DSNY, and NYPD. This fragmentation creates confusion, inconsistent enforcement, and widespread distrust.

An SVD would function as a one-stop hub, simplifying compliance by consolidating authority into a single, accountable institution designed specifically around the realities of street vending. This department would oversee permit issuance, maintain updated and accessible regulations, and coordinate enforcement efforts to eliminate double enforcement. Importantly, the SVD would shift the city’s relationship with vendors from adversarial to collaborative, positioning the city as a partner in compliance rather than a punitive overseer. Centralized governance would also improve data collection and transparency, enabling the city to better assess vending density, enforcement patterns, and community needs.

Replace Punitive Enforcement with Education-Based Compliance:

Fines and confiscations should be replaced with warnings, training, and technical assistance. Just as brick-and-mortar businesses receive support to meet regulatory standards, vendors should be offered accessible education on sanitation, waste disposal, noise management, and safety practices.

Embed Language Justice into All Aspects of Regulation:

Language access must be structural, not symbolic. With more than half of street vendors reporting limited English proficiency, the city’s assumption of English fluency at every stage of licensing, enforcement, and adjudication constitutes a structural barrier to compliance. When vendors cannot understand summonses, retrieval procedures, or court documents, enforcement becomes unjust.

The SVD, along with any other institution interacting with street vendors, must provide real-time interpretation during enforcement interactions, including during confiscations and ticket issuance. All licensing materials, training programs, and compliance guidance should be available in the primary languages spoken by vendors. Additionally, court summonses, appeal processes, and merchandise retrieval procedures must be language-accessible to ensure due process. By embedding language justice into regulatory design, the city would ensure that compliance is determined by a vendor’s actions and not by their fluency in English.

Create a Civilian-Led Complaint Review Process:

To curb privatized policing through Business Improvement Districts and 311 complaints, the city should establish a transparent, civilian-led review process that evaluates complaints, notifies vendors in their language, and mandates education rather than immediate enforcement.

Conclusion

Street vending is not a nuisance to be eliminated but a form of labor that sustains NYC’s economy, culture, and immigrant communities. Yet for decades, the city has relied on punitive, fragmented, and exclusionary policies that criminalize vendors for systemic failures beyond their control. Broken windows policing, arbitrary permit caps, and language exclusion have transformed public space into a site of constant surveillance and punishment for the city’s most vulnerable workers.

Decriminalizing street vending requires more than incremental reform. It demands a shift in how the city understands public space, labor, and governance. By lifting the permit cap, establishing a Street Vendor Department, embedding language justice, and replacing punishment with education, NYC can move toward a regulatory system rooted in dignity rather than discipline.

Ultimately, the question is not whether street vendors belong in NYC, but whether the city is willing to build institutions that reflect the realities of the people who sustain it. Who owns the streets should not be dictated by enforcement alone, but by equity, inclusion, and shared responsibility for the city’s public life.