I’m a big fan of my fellow Chinese lady who sells $2 noodles at the corner of Elizabeth and Hester Streets, and I have a new appreciation for all the drama she has to endure as a street vendor in NYC. As the designer for one of the Making Policy Public projects, I’m working closely with The Center for Urban Pedagogy and The Street Vendor Project to create a fold-out brochure distilling NYC’s complex vending laws into something accessible. At least 4000 copies will be distributed to street vendors as a useful resource and made available to others as an advocacy tool for policy reforms. Because many of NYC’s street vendors are immigrants, we’re making the rules as pictorial as possible and translating the rest into Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, and Spanish. It’s been fun talking with vendors, collaborating on content and illustrating everything, and here are some more shots of the work-in-progress:

I went to the Street Vendor Project’s monthly meeting yesterday to get feedback on the brochure and check out the scene…

One guy has already been fined $1000 this month for minor infractions like parking his cart too far away from the curb. As a comparison, a parking ticket is $65. Also, city officials are proposing that vendors can never leave their cart (who needs bathroom breaks?) and that all vendors must display an unobstructed 36″ x 18″ sign that shows they’ve got the appropriate licenses. This would take up serious space on their size-restricted tables. Vendor and board member Larry McDonald said, “Forget about your goods. You’re going to be selling the sign!”