Hucksters and Trucksters: Criminalization and Gentrification in New York City's Street Vending Industry

The expansion of the informal economy since the 1970s developed in tandem with a growing militarization of urban public space, creating extreme precarity for street vendors, a leading occupational group within the informal sector. Based on over three years of participant observation and seventy interviews with street vendors and their advocates, this dissertation examines the present-day street vending industry in New York City, which has long been comprised of first-generation immigrants, but has in recent years seen a marked growth in highly educated, native-born gourmet food truck owners. The research illustrates how two processes, inherent to what I term the post-industrial complex, are increasing stratification within New York's street economy. First, there is a dramatic criminalization of immigrant street vendors who regularly encounter arrests and ticketing. This blocks their upward mobility, most acutely for women, and locates vendors in a liminal class position, possessing elements of proprietorship that are subjugated by the governance of public space. Second, a new wave of commercial gentrification has occurred within street vending, where more affluent native-born vendors are able to effectively capitalize on vending to rapidly establish brick-and-mortar businesses, and in so doing inflate the price of vending permits in the underground economy. These divergent conditions reveal how the governance of post-industrial urban space reinforces the criminalization of poor and working class people of color, while facilitating the advancement of more affluent and predominantly white professionals. The streets of the post-industrial complex are policed as a border for immigrant vendors, and are pioneered as a frontier by native-born food truck owners. Yet criminalization has produced street vendor solidarities, evidenced in a growing street labor movement amongst immigrant vendors in New York. Like most vendor organizations across the Global South, two immigrant street vendor worker centers in New York press the municipal government to uphold vendors' right to the city. In contrast, the city's native-born food truck owners have established a business association not to achieve social justice but to increase profitability. Post-industrial urban governance thus deepens inequalities within the informal economy while spurring new movements to claim the enduring resource of urban public space.