A perspective on street vending (Part One)

Waiting for the next sale

If you walk down Regent Street or Water Street these days, you would think that there had never been a clampdown on street vending. The vendors are there in vast numbers and if the municipality is planning to clear the pavements again anytime soon it will not be easy.

Apart from what they seem to believe is their moral right to trade on the streets, the vendors have come to resemble part of the commercial landscape anyway. They appear to belong alongside the traditional high street traders many of whom have been there for decades. It’s a kind of living along arrangement that acknowledges that everyone has to make a dollar.

The tenacity of the vendors has worn the municipality down. That is hardly surprising. There is a lot at stake for the vendors, who are mostly female and mostly undereducated. Most of the ten or so vendors who agreed to talk about the subject said that they were not yet 40 and that they had school-age children. More than half of them are single parents and none of