Ara Shirinian: Legalizing street vendors would serve community

Since I started attending UCLA, I’ve considered the fruit stands that I often pass on my way home a fixture of Westwood Village.

The fruit stands are just one example of the thousands of street vendors in Los Angeles that call the road their home, and to me are just another part of what the Village has to offer. Street vendors have become ingrained into the culture of Los Angeles and contribute to the city’s reputation as one of the food meccas of the world. It’s an unpleasant reality that despite the prevalence of vendors, L.A. remains the only major U.S. city that has not legalized street vending. The debate over legalizing street vending in Los Angeles has become very heated in recent months as the city has been discussing an ordinance to do just that, and may vote on the issue sometime within the coming months.

It’s important to discuss health and safety regulations for street vendors. Los Angeles should provide permits to street vendors so that this important part of the city’s culture can be maintained in a safe, sustainable and economically beneficial way.

There are limitless ways in which a regulated permit system could shape street vending to add purchasing choices and bring healthy alternatives to fast food.

Potential guidelines for permits could include location restrictions, a limit on the number of available permits in a given area and reduced cost permits for healthy food stands. This would help mitigate many of the potential problems with street vendors, including overcrowded streets and too many unhealthy food options. It would also allow the state to collect taxes and enforce health regulations on a very large sector of the food industry.

A perfect example of a successful vending venture is TLT Food – born from The Lime Truck Food – a well-reviewed eatery in Westwood Village that got its start as a food truck in 2010 with an emphasis on organic and locally sourced ingredients; this exemplifies how street-born businesses can offer healthy, restaurant-quality meals. The success of the truck helped them secure the funds and the following necessary to open the restaurant that exists in Westwood today.

It’s notoriously difficult to start a restaurant from scratch in a market dominated by established players and extremely high costs of entry. TLT Food is just one of the many small businesses that have used vending as a platform for growth into retail.

Food trucks and street vendors are different business models with slightly different challenges. But the legalization of food trucks, which has proven to be economically sound, parallels precisely what street vending can become if it is granted the same legal status. In Westwood, street vendors and food trucks share many of the same challenges and have faced many of the same complaints.

These vendors that have transitioned into full retail serve as examples of how food trucks, street vendors and retail stores all have different advantages. Retailers have larger storage spaces, bigger kitchens with higher output capacities and seating areas for customers, while street vendors have fewer costs. Intelligent business owners should be able to remain competitive in either kind of business successfully by playing to their advantages.

In spite of these success stories, opponents of legalization often rely on caricatures of vendors that depict them as unsanitary and uncaring toward the community they serve. In many cases though, this is quite far from the truth.

Steve Sann, chair of the Westwood Community Council, said he’s apprehensive about the possibility of legalization currently being discussed in the city council. One of his most pressing concerns is the health risks related to food preparation because those regulations can be extremely hard to enforce. The other major problem is that inherently lower costs allow vendors to undercut local businesses which leads to unfair competition that might put some shops out of business, Sann said.

While some of these concerns are warranted, there doesn’t seem to be any hurdle that can’t be overcome, and the claims about unsanitary conditions are almost always overblown.

A recent study conducted by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit libertarian public interest law firm, found that street vendors and food trucks in seven major cities, including Los Angeles, averaged either the same number of or fewer food safety violations than competing restaurants.

Many street vendors are entrepreneurs who feel their businesses contribute to their community, but can’t afford to own full retail or dining locations. These vendors often have no problems following guidelines or paying taxes and just want to run their business under the legal requirements and protections of the law.

What it comes down to is that street vendors are extremely common despite their legal status because there is a great demand for them. As the debate about legalization of street vending continues, the city is losing out on millions of dollars worth of taxes that it should be collecting while decriminalizing the individuals who are trying to run honest businesses.