Street cart justice

Above: a poster for the Vendy Awards, a project of the Urban Justice Center designed to promote its Street Vendor Project:

[I]n recent years, vendors have been victims of New York’s aggressive “quality of life” crackdown. They have been denied access to vending licenses. Many streets have been closed to them at the urging of powerful business groups. They receive $1,000 tickets for minor violations like vending too close to a crosswalk -- more than any big businesses are required to pay for similar violations.

The Street Vendor Project is a membership-based project with more than 750 active vendor members who are working together to create a vendors' movement for permanent change. We reach out to vendors in the streets and storage garages and teach them about their legal rights and responsibilities. We hold meetings where we plan collective actions for getting our voices heard. We publish reports and file lawsuits to raise public awareness about vendors and the enormous contribution they make to our city. Finally, we help vendors grow their businesses by linking them with small business training and loans.

In recent years, the social enterprise movement has more-or-less succeeded in associating "local" with "virtuous" in relation to commercial business. The Street Cart Project reflects similar semantic play, contrasting the mobile cart to a fixed structure.

Once again, design plays a role in our ethical perception. Separate carts distract from the issue of common corporate ownership, as do compelling stories of plucky individuals making a living on the streets. Moreover, note the winner of the People's Choice Vendy, the Dessert Truck--while a crowd favorite among professionals and the upwardly mobile, it's also part of a broader trend of gentrification within the street vendor industry. Replace a old diner with a gourmet dessert shop and New York is dying; flood the streets with Food Network friendly carts and you're a champion of the dispossessed.