Waleed Salama spent two years studying vending regulations before setting up his own Halal cart along Eighth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan in 2002, where he travels from his home in Coney Island six days a week to work. But the 59-year-old said his preparations have rarely helped him fend off tickets, especially in the last two years as enforcement has intensified.

“The police will come every day and write a ticket. They might even come and write you two or three tickets on the same day,” said Salama, who holds a vending permit and moved to the city from Egypt in 2000. “They’ll write tickets about anything — they’ll find a thing to write a ticket for. And when I ask them, ‘Why are you here? Why are you bothering me?’ The police will say, ‘You know my boss sent me, you know it’s not up to me.’”

Salama’s experience is emblematic of many street vendors in New York City, as most vending tickets are issued in predominantly white and wealthy areas to immigrant and minority sellers living in much poorer outerborough neighborhoods, according to a new report by the Worker Institute at Cornell University.

Just over half of all civil tickets issued for street vending in 2024 were handed to sellers living in neighborhoods with the highest poverty rates in the city, the analysis of multiple agencies’ summons data shows.

The four areas with the most criminal vending summonses were all in Midtown, from 25th to 60th streets and Fifth Avenue westward, as were two of the top five ZIP codes where the most civil tickets were issued. All of these Midtown ZIP codes represent areas with fewer nonwhite residents than the city average, according to census data cited in the report.

By contrast, the top five ZIP codes representing the home addresses of vendors who received civil tickets were in Astoria, Corona and Elmhurst in Queens and Sunset Park in Brooklyn — three of which represent more nonwhite and immigrant residents, as well as higher poverty rates, than the city average. (NYPD public data for criminal tickets does not list residential addresses for vendors.) 

This, the report charges, “paints the picture of an expensive program to criminalize immigrant and minority populations primarily for operating in predominantly white spaces.”

The study comes as the number of street vending tickets continues to surge amid a series of much trumpeted crackdowns by Mayor Eric Adams’ istration, including Operation Restore Roosevelt in Corona.

Overall, became the primary agency in charge of vendor enforcement in April of that year, though the police department has remained heavily involved in ticketing along with the parks and health departments.

“No other industry is so exposed to government oversight. The result is a nearly impossible web of regulations and bureaucracy for this primarily low-income immigrant workforce to navigate,” the authors of the Cornell report wrote. “The complicated web of enforcement across agencies means a lot of time, money, and resources are spent on street vending enforcement.”

The report also calls the sanitation department’s enforcement effort “costly and ineffective.” 

DSNY last year imposed about $200,000 in vending-related fines but collected just $91,000 of it while spending $2 million on street-seller enforcement, the report noted. That’s roughly an average of $21 dollars lost for every one of the 1,502 vending tickets the department issued.

While the parks, health and police departments also issue vending tickets, no other agency provided specific expenditure data for those efforts.

DSNY press secretary Vincent Gragnani said raising money isn’t the department’s goal for enforcement.

“We have said many times we do not enforce for potential revenue,” Gragnani said. “Enforcement is a tool to ensure people comply with existing laws. We would be thrilled if everyone obeyed the law and we did not have to issue any fines.”

Advocates, however, argue that legislators and agencies should turn to reform efforts that they say would not only create revenue for the city but also expand opportunities for street vendors. 

Carina Kaufman-Gutierrez, deputy director for the advocacy group Street Vendor Project, cited a report from the city’s Independent Budget Office last year that found a bill to eventually lift the caps on vending permits would generate $17 million in net revenue for the city.

“If the city is losing money on a policy that also pushes New Yorkers further into poverty and destabilizes them, when they’re also now presented with an opportunity to actually create jobs and formalize a system, that to me seems like a very clear choice on creating a policy that’s both beneficial to the city’s coffers but also s our city’s smallest businesses,” Kaufman-Gutierrez said.

The City Council, where many have pushed to reform the vending system rather than increase enforcement, notably proposed allocating $7.7 million in its preliminary budget response for the coming fiscal year “to expand and formalize a permanent Vendor Enforcement Unit” at sanitation. The department’s unit included 35 officers, four lieutenants and one inspector as of November 2024.

Council spokesperson Julia Agos told THE CITY its funding proposal “seeks to ensure adequate staffing needed to thoughtfully and equitably approach” street vending issues.

“Street vending is a vibrant part of our city’s culture and economy, and it must operate in a safe and fair manner,” Agos said. “Effective enforcement should not mean overly relying on fines or engaging in the destruction of property, but rather ensuring compliance in a way that both s the quality of life for all New Yorkers and the ability of New Yorkers to make a living.”

‘What’s the Point of It?’

While most vending tickets last year were issued for unlicensed vending, “quality-of-life” infractions such as improper setups were also frequently penalized, the report noted. 

Vendors, however, say those rules are arbitrarily enforced — another sign of ineffective enforcement that perpetuates harm towards sellers through what the report calls “myriad and often confusing regulations.”

Salama, for one, said he once received an NYPD criminal ticket for failing to display his vending license while he was still setting up shop for the day. Another time, he was hit with a criminal summons for operating from within 15 feet of a fire hydrant — a rule which only applies to merchandise vendors, as city laws governing food vendors only require that their carts not touch or lean against hydrants.

“Oftentimes when I go to Criminal Court, the tickets will actually get dismissed, because it’s usually written incorrectly by the police,” Salama said. “But it’s a problem because with Criminal Court, I have to physically attend to myself, which means I lose the day of work.” 

These days, he added, ticketing and time lost to attending court can eat up about 30% of his vending income.

Birane Ndiaye, another Midtown seller, thought his troubles with vendor enforcement would slow down when he received a merchandise vending license in 2015 to sell accessories like hats and sunglasses after spending 21 years on the waitlist. (The city has for decades capped those licenses at 853 for non-veteran sellers, leaving more than 11,900 people on a waitlist.)

But enforcement from the sanitation department has ramped up especially since the beginning of this year, Ndiaye observed. He’s always been careful to avoid areas where vending is prohibited, he added, but has nonetheless received two tickets so far this year for violating those rules while selling outside of the restricted areas as indicated in a booklet he received from the city when he obtained his license.

“Most of the time they don’t even pay attention to where I’m vending. Wherever I go, they will come,” said Ndiaye, who moved to the city from Senegal in 1988. “Everyday I wake up, I just put in my mind that I’m going to get a ticket.”

While those two tickets have cost Ndiaye just $25 a piece so far, the 61-year-old said it cost him $250 — equivalent to two days worth of income on a good week — to reclaim confiscated goods from the sanitation department, and another $100 to rent a vehicle to transport those items back to storage.

“I’ve had difficulties paying my rent because I’ve had to use the money I was saving up for it to get my stuff back,” said Ndiaye, who pays $620 a month to share a rental apartment in Harlem. “If the city is going to give us a license but then not allow us to sell where we can make money, what’s the point of it? Does the city want vendors to be homeless?”

Gragnani, the sanitation spokesperson, said the department “did not create street vending laws nor set the fines” but rather is there to “enforce existing laws.” He also added that the department receives many enforcement requests from elected officials, community boards, business improvement districts and 311 service requests.

“These requests and our enforcement work are rooted in the belief that all New Yorkers, across every neighborhood, in every borough, deserve clean, safe sidewalks,” he added. 

Fruit vendor Johirul Islam, for his part, said he recently received a $250 ticket from DSNY for a napkin on the ground he said wasn’t even from his business. He was also fined $25 two months ago for adding an extra layer of protection on top of an umbrella that covers his cart.

“They issue you tickets no matter what, even if it’s not in any law that we know of,” said Islam, who commutes from Ozone Park at least five days a week to set up shop on the Upper West Side, where he’s been working for the past 25 years. “We always joke among ourselves that sanitation police are not happy until they issue tickets.”

One of his neighboring fruit vendors, he said, recently closed up shop after receiving a summons, while another is planning to do the same.

“I’d drive by and I wouldn’t see them anymore,” said Islam, an immigrant from Bangladesh who is contemplating whether he should forgo vending altogether and try to make a living as a yellow cab driver instead.

“I feel bad that my friends are all moving away, because it could be me anytime.”