My Time Creating NYC Vendor Voices
At the beginning of my spring semester at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, I had to figure out what community I wanted to serve the next two semesters. I originally wanted to work with Black visual artists, but realized that it was difficult for me to figure out exactly what they needed from the news and journalism as a whole.
I had an interaction with a street vendor early in 2022, as well as some of the tour bus workers who were looking to have people ride the buses and I started thinking about whether or not these workers had set networks, if they had spaces where they convened and spoke about the state of their work, how did benefits work for them, did they even qualify for benefits? From some clip searches, I learned that the state of street vending in the city was a precarious situation, something that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated, and it was then that I decided that this was the community I wanted to serve. This turned into my project NYC Vendor Voices.
At Newmark we are required to submit a multimedia capstone for our final project at the school. While the Instagram page is my main body of work, in order to fill school requirements, I created an interactive website built from HTML, CSS, and Javascript to host the content I’ve been creating in service to my community. This includes my published article with Prism, my NYC Vendor Voices Instagram page, and a YouTube playlist I created that has videos pertaining to the news surrounding NYC vendors, featuring voices from the Street Vendor Project. The website was designed with HTML and CSS, and the interactive aspect is the audio feature attached at the top, the audio being provided by three students in the audio doc class at CUNY.
Aside from the content I mentioned above, there are links at the bottom of the website where people can go to learn more about the senate bill proposed by NY State Senator Jessica Ramos last year, the Street Vendor Project, and the history of street vending in the city. I plan on adding more content as I continue to build the landing page.
Background on the Street Vendors of NYC
My community, like I stated, is the street vendor community of New York city. While that seems quite big, considering there are around 20,000+ vendors throughout the city, because they’re of such a magnitude it provides easy access to them for me and my work. There are vendors in all five boroughs, and they range from a variety of backgrounds from West Africa to North Africa to India. Because of this massive diversity, they also speak many languages including French, Spanish, Wolof, Hindi, Bangla, and Arabic. The vendors sell a variety of goods including food (from halal food to different foods from Latin America), hats, sunglasses, toys, purses, marijuana, etc. In the city, there are specific areas in which vendors are prominent, like Canal Street in Chinatown, Jackson Heights and Corona Plaza in Queens, and Times Square in Midtown Manhattan, where vendors are met with the tourists that come to visit the city every day.
There is a mixture of licensed and unlicensed vendors within this community. Recently, the city passed a resolution in which they’d introduce 400 permits each year for the next 10 years. This was intended to allow more people to operate legally. However, it’s been recently reported that there have been delays in providing these permits, which I reported on myself with Prism. According to The City and Bronx Times, back in July the city was supposed to begin the rollout of the permits, but were delayed due to the system not being set up. Not only that, but there are stipulations to the permits that vendors don’t agree with, such as the ability to choose where their permit is valid, or who gets first pick based on when they joined the waitlist.
For context, vending permits have been capped for the past four decades at 5,100. Due to the limitation of permits, an underground market has been able to thrive, selling vendors fake permits, or renting permits to them, for up to $20,000 a year. The introduction of the bill was supposed to alleviate this, but the supply does not meet the demand, and it won’t at the rate the city is planning on giving out these permits.
Outside of permits, there is the issue of over-policing and overciting vendors throughout the city. For a long time, the NYPD was the body that oversaw street vendors and any conflicts that arose. That job has now been placed under the Department of Consumer and Worker Protections (DCWP). Despite this change, tickets issued by DCWP have seen a 33 percent increase compared to 2019, according to City Limits. DCWP is also working jointly with the NYPD, defeating the purpose of switching who oversees this work in the first place. Areas such as Jackson Heights in Queens, and Chelsea in Manhattan, have been ranked amongst the top places to receive vendor complaints.
Jackson Heights is a predominantly Latiné neighborhood, where many of the vendors are of Latiné descent and Spanish is their first language. The vendors have no choice but to sell on the street, whether due to documentation or other issues, and are unable to do so legally. There are many instances where DCWP has come for inspections, forcing vendors to flee their spots in fear of receiving permits. There has even been an instance in which the tables they utilize for vending were thrown away by DCWP and sanitation. This is an example of what these vendors have to deal with on a daily basis.
This past year, Senator Jessica Ramos introduced a bill that would legalize vending throughout the city. Unfortunately, the bill did not pass and is now being shifted into the 2023 session. The City Council also has the opportunity to take it on. The passing of this bill would create a much easier pathway for vendors to operate their businesses without fear of being policed or harmed.
Reflection on my work
Working with the vendors for nearly a year has taught me a lot about journalism and doing journalism with the intention of being in service of others. What I learned from this process is that in order to do this work well, you must be a consistent presence amongst the community you wish to serve. The current idea of journalism to the general public is that journalists only come for the scoop, whether it be a tragedy or something considered “newsworthy”, they come in, they get their quotes, and then they leave. No follow up content, no follow up conversations with their sources, just work that serves them and their newsroom. What we’re taught in engagement journalism is to combat that narrative, and bring change to newsrooms to do more meaningful work that has longevity in the communities they plan to serve.
I did find success with this work, most notably my piece with Prism, and I am proud of it. But, I know I could have done more, and could have done a better job engaging with different members of the street vendor community this semester. The intention was there but the execution was lacking. If I could do something different, I would do my best to schedule days out that were solely to gain new connections with the community. That way I knew what the goal was for that day, and maybe set a quota to reach 10 vendors the days I was out and working.
When working with street vendors specifically, some best practices I recommend are meeting them consistently, doing your best to speak to them in their native language if it’s not English, and it doesn’t hurt to buy a sandwich or mango con tajin while you’re interacting with them. All of these practices assists with building trust amongst the community. I also want to add that your goal should be to have a sustained relationship with them. Street vendors usually only gain traction in the media when they’re protesting or they’ve been subjected to an attack by the NYPD or another citizen. This makes them a spectacle and overshadows their humanity, something that I wanted to use my work to address and change.
So, if you are going to take these best practices to interact with the community, do not do what I mentioned above and simply drop in for a scoop and leave. If they say they don’t want photos, or they want to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, please respect that and do the work to ensure their wishes are fulfilled, whether by you or you and your newsroom. These people are vulnerable, especially the unlicensed ones, and they’re risking their privacy to interact with you. You must treat that fact with care.
Ways you can support my work and street vendors:
- You can look at my landing page here: https://hafeezatb.github.io/nyc-vendors-homepage/ .
- You can follow NYC Vendor Voices on Instagram and Facebook.
- You can check out the Street Vendor Project: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Website.
- Here is the bill Senator Ramos introduced that would legalize street vending. If you live in NY, you can contact your elected officials and express your interest in having the bill reconisdered and passed.