The New York City Council is expected to pass a bill Thursday to create thousands of new street vendor licenses in the coming years and dramatically expand the number of vendors able to operate legally across the city.
The measure, which was introduced by Councilmember Pierina Sanchez of the Bronx with majority Council support, would add 2,200 food vendor licenses annually over the next five years, starting on July 1, 2026. The bill would also add 10,500 licenses for general merchandise vendors on Jan. 15, 2027, which city data shows would clear the current waitlist for those sellers.
Vendors and their supporters are hopeful the new licenses will allow more people to operate lawfully on city streets and avoid hefty fines and fees, while also boosting economic activity across neighborhoods.
“We are regulating an industry that’s huge, that has tens of thousands of people that are operating in it right now,” said Mohamed Attia, director of the nonprofit Street Vendor Project, which has long pushed for the city to issue more street vendor licenses. “A lot of them operate in the shadows. They don’t have the proper license.”
It remains unclear if Mayor Eric Adams would sign the bill following its likely passage at the Council’s last meeting of the session. Spokespeople for his office did not respond to a request for comment. Administration officials testified at a Council hearing in May that they generally supported expanding street vending licenses to bring more vendors into regulatory compliance, but did not directly endorse the legislation and expressed concerns that fully removing the existing caps on these licenses could produce quality-of-life issues.
If the bill isn’t vetoed within 30 days after passage, it will automatically become law, according to the City Council. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who takes office on Jan. 1, has signaled his support for the measure, saying it will help combat what he has called “halal-flation,” a reference to rising prices at the city’s food carts.
“My administration will make sure the work doesn’t stop with this bill and guarantee we process new licenses, staff our enforcement agencies and allow street vendors — the heart of New York City — to operate with dignity,” he said in a social media post Wednesday night.
The vast majority of the city’s estimated 23,000 street vendors currently operate without required licenses or permits, in large part due to long-standing limits on the number of these documents issued by the city, vendor advocates say. Nearly all of the city’s vendors are immigrants, according to a study released last year by the nonprofit Immigration Research Initiative. The study found just over a third of general merchandise vendors in the city have licenses, while only a quarter of food vendors have secured the required documentation to operate legally.
The number of general vendor licenses has been capped at 853 since 1979. A 2021 city law created a new licensing system for food vendors, adding 445 licenses for food vendors annually from July 2022 through 2032, on top of the roughly 3,000 permits capped since 1983.
But the city health department has missed deadlines for issuing extra food-vending permits under that law, according to the city comptroller. Vendor advocates have argued the reforms were insufficient to meet the growing demand for licenses, given lengthy waitlists.
About 8,900 people are currently on the waitlist for general merchandise licenses, according to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. The Department of Health did not respond to a request for comment about the waitlist for food vendor licenses and permits.
Some vendors have obtained licenses and permits on the black market, sometimes paying thousands of dollars to rent or buy them, according to the Street Vendor Project.
According to projections published this week by the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, Sanchez’s bill is expected to cost nearly $11 million over four years as the city adds staff to process more licenses. The projections do not include potential new revenue from the changes, with the office saying while this amount was “not currently ascertainable,” officials still believed it “would be less than the total additional processing costs incurred by agencies.”
If the city eliminated the caps and provided licenses to all vendors on the waitlists, it would receive $59 million in net revenue from taxes, fines and registration fees after accounting for implementation costs, according to a recent report by the city’s Independent Budget Office.
The bill’s original version would have entirely lifted the caps on street vendor licenses, but the measure was later scaled down due to concerns raised by brick-and-mortar business interests, according to Sanchez. The councilmember said the final number of licenses being created under the bill is based on current estimates of the city’s street vending population, to ensure the vast majority would have access to licenses. The gradual phase-in of the expansion will help the city administer the program effectively, she added.
“This is transformational for the street vendors who are out there everyday vending in fear, who don’t know if they’re going to have an interaction with law enforcement,” Sanchez said.
The bill also allows city officials to revoke licenses from vendors who receive three tickets in a year for violating rules on how they’re supposed to operate. The measure additionally requires vendors to keep the area around their carts garbage-free and be able to prove they’re properly disposing of trash at a commissary.
Another bill expected to pass Thursday, which was proposed by Public Advocate Jumaane Williams with majority Council support, would create a city “Division of Street Vendor Assistance” to provide multilingual education for vendors about how to comply with various local laws, as well as other resources.
