In 2008, the city health department opened up 1,000 permits for street vendors to sell fresh fruits and vegetables in New York City’s food deserts.
But just 149 vendors held those Green Carts permits as of the end of May, while 1,445 others remained on a waitlist for a chance to apply for the 851 that were still up for grabs, according to a new analysis of data THE CITY obtained from the health department last month via a public records request.
When the permits were launched 16 years ago, then-mayor Michael Bloomberg touted the program as an “important public health initiative that responds to the need for fresh produce close to home,” and said it would “provide opportunities for vendors to make a living selling fresh fruits and vegetables in communities where healthy food can be difficult to find.” Five years after the program’s launch, in 2013, more than 500 vendors held those produce permits.
But the gap between what the city promised and what it has delivered has widened since then. Nearly 1,500 vendors are now on the permit waitlist, which has been sealed off since May 2022 after briefly opening for the three months prior.
Carina Kaufman-Gutierrez, deputy director of the non-profit Street Vendor Project, said the disconnect is indicative of an “extremely onerous bureaucratic process” that’s created unnecessary delays for prospective vendors.
“Clearly there’s an issue there,” Kaufman-Gutierrez said. “People who want to be able to work as Green Carts vendors should be able to just apply to do it. There shouldn’t be this huge backlog of months and months or years and years of waiting, to the point where it might not even be relevant for the person who got on the waitlist back in the day.”
Vendors who have been called off the waitlist, in fact, do not generally turn in an application to begin the permitting process, the data shows. Last year, just 91 of the 600 vendors called off the queue officially applied.
For vendors who are still interested, however, the wait to put in an application has been painfully slow, with months sometimes passing before a new group of applicants — no more than 160 at a time in recent years — was offered permits.
About a month after THE CITY submitted its request for the vendor data in April, the department called 750 vendors off the waitlist. The department didn’t say how many of them accepted a permit.
Shari Logan, a department spokesperson, told THE CITY it is “working on ways to speed up the application process,” including by issuing more applications at once.
She added that 309 Green Carts vendors now have permits — meaning the number more than doubled since THE CITY obtained the data last month.
Advocates have called on the city to do more to permit legal vending, and more so as newly arrived migrants have turned to vending over the last two years. Although the health department in 2022 amended regulations to allow Green Carts vendors to also sell water, nuts, and cut fruits and vegetables — in addition to whole produce as was allowed before — the permit waitlist has yet to reopen.
“There are tons of cut fruit vendors in New York City, but they can’t get permits,” said Matthew Shapiro, Street Vendor Project’s legal director. “And ostensibly, now there are permits available that these vendors could use but because of the waiting list or because of all of the rules, they’re not able to do it. So the government has failed to figure out a way to make it so these vendors can actually do what they’re doing legally.”
High-Cart Costs
Logan said the health department is now reaching out to vendors to understand why only a handful of them have turned in applications after being called off the Green Carts waitlist.
But Shapiro, who helps vendors navigate permits, said it is in part due to the difficult economics of running a perishable food business within the health department’s restrictive regulations.
Green Carts permits are allocated by boroughs, with set quotas for each, and legally operable only within police precinct areas where “the rate of fresh produce consumption is substantially lower than the citywide average.” And unlike produce vendors at farmer’s markets who can more or less operate from impromptu set-ups, Green Carts vendors are required by law to operate from set-ups that meet specific standards — which Shapiro estimated cost about $5,000 to procure.
Ernesto Garcia, a 39-year-old native of the Mexican state of Puebla, said it cost him and his mother at least $36,000 to start up their Green Carts business in Soundview, Bronx when his mother’s name was called off the waitlist in 2022, after what he said had been more than a decade of waiting.
First it was $30,000 for a van to transport his produce, then it was another $6,000 for the cart itself. Then there was the $500 monthly rent he had to pay a health department–approved facility to park his cart nightly, on top of another $500 he spent about four times a week to source fresh produce from the Hunts Points produce market.
Even after working 17 hour days — starting from when he’d arrive at the produce market at 5 a.m. to when he’d return to his van to a garage at 10 p.m. — Garcia said he would gross no more than $230 on a good day, and often lose money on a bad day.
“The gains wouldn’t last because I was only dedicated to the business, and I didn’t have another job aside from this. And sometimes the produce would go bad, and I would not recover the money,” Garcia told THE CITY in Spanish. “Sometimes I would come out short, and I would have to ask my siblings to lend me money.”
Seven months ago, Garcia said, he and his mother decided to shutter their Green Carts because of his mother’s old age and because they can no longer sustain the business’s losses.
“I feel very frustrated and sad that it didn’t turn out as planned, and I don’t know if it was because I didn’t put in enough effort, or because the economy is bad, but I’m sad that we had to make that decision,” said Garcia, who’s now working nights in a pizza shop.
Other vendors who’ve been called off the Green Carts waitlist have also surrendered their opportunity to apply for a permit after considering possible profits and losses.
That includes Adelaida Simon Carrasco, who had been selling tamales and pozoles outside the N train station on Bay Parkway since 2016, until she was hit by a car in 2022 and took a break from vending to focus on recovery.
Simon Carrasco recalled submitting her name to the Green Carts waitlist around 2016 after receiving a $1,000 fine for unlicensed sales. And while she had been primarily interested in selling prepared food, she entered the produce permits waitlist because no other vending waitlist had been open at the time.
When the 40-year-old was called off the waitlist in 2022, however, she ultimately chose not to pursue a permit because she wasn’t confident that the business was going to be profitable.
“It’s not a good business for me, because fruits are seasonal — maybe in the summer, I can sell a lot. But what I want is a food permit,” Simon Carrasco said.
And because street vendors can hold only one permit at a time, Kaufman-Gutierrez added, a number of sellers also end up abandoning the opportunity to apply for a Green Carts permit once they’re called off the waitlist, so they can hold onto startup costs in case they’re selected from other waitlists to apply for permits that could yield more lucrative incomes — food vending permits, for example.
Garcia, meanwhile, is making the food and working the register at a pizza shop. The 39-year-old said he has been selling gum, chocolates and candies with his mother and late father on subway cars and on streets since they emigrated to New York when he was seven years old — and hopes to return to vending produce one day.
But to do that, he would first have to find a way back to the Green Carts waitlist when it next reopens, because current regulations would not allow for his mother to transfer the permit into his hands.
“I want to add myself to the Green Carts waitlist if it ever opens again,” Garcia said in Spanish. “It’s an experience that serves as a lesson for the future when I want to open a business so I have an idea of how to work.”
