Carina Kaufman-Gutierrez has been advocating on behalf of street vendors for the past seven years, canvassing them on issues, and keeping them informed of the complex maze of local vending laws.
She’s often visited vending hot spots, with fliers and a measuring tape in hand, which she used to help vendors ensure their stands were the proper size, and to maintain the required distance from driveways, crosswalks and other buildings — and to avoid hefty fines, fees and tickets.
Carina Kaufman-Gutierrez
But her organization, the Street Vendor Project, was too small to meet all the requests for help with the array of issues.
“These services are in such demand,” Kaufman-Gutierrez told Gothamist on a canvassing trip in 2023. “We need our city to step up and help these entrepreneurs do their job well.”
Now, the former vendor organizer is joining the fray from inside City Hall: Her appointment as executive director of the new Office of Street Vendor Services, within the city’s Department of Small Business Services, is expected to be announced on Monday, according to City Hall.
She will join an institution with which she has often been at odds, taking the helm of an office designed to educate street vendors about local laws and in multiple languages, replicating some of her work with the Street Vendor Project, but this time at scale.
“What we're doing here is establishing a new era for street vendors, within the administration within New York City, to make sure that we're focused on actual true education for folks to be able to invest in their businesses, to grow them, and to know that they have a support system,” Kaufman-Gutierrez said in an interview ahead of the formal announcement.
Kaufman-Gutierrez will be in charge of outreach to the city’s estimated 23,000 street vendors, nearly all of whom are immigrants, and many lack licenses or permits. Her appointment comes as the Mamdani administration is charged with undertaking sweeping reforms, including making available 21,500 new vending licenses and permits over the next five years.
The new office, mandated by a City Council bill passed last year, comes after a series of battles over street vending enforcement under past administrations. Former Mayor Eric Adams' administration cracked down on unlicensed vending at Corona Plaza, Roosevelt Avenue and other vending hot spots throughout the city. And year after year, viral videos have surfaced of police arresting street vendors in sometimes violent encounters.
Kaufman-Gutierrez was most recently the co-director of the Street Vendor Project, a group that advocated for major legislative reforms for street vendors in the last several years, including the most recent Council bills. She joined the group after completing a master's degree in International Affairs, Urban Social Policy, and Conflict Resolution at Columbia University.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani supported the establishment of the new office on the campaign trail. He campaigned on combatting “halalflation,” working to make halal food cheaper by, in part, cracking down on the black market street vendor license system. With a long-standing cap on the number of vendor licenses and permits, vendors have paid tens of thousands of dollars to rent others’ documents.
Instead, Mamdani supported a measure, which has since become law, to establish more permits and licenses for vendors across the city to legally operate.
“Our street vendors are not a problem to solve — they are a community to support,” the mayor said in a statement. “We will fundamentally transform the relationship that street vendors have with the city. By streamlining bureaucracy and working closely with street vendors themselves, we can lower costs for vendors and their customers alike.”
Past mayors have maintained a tenuous relationship with street vendors, sometimes deriding the largely immigrant workforce or approaching unlicensed vendors as a nuisance abatement issue. In 1988, then-Mayor Ed Koch justified a series of vendor enforcement sweeps to the New York Times, saying, "This is not supposed to look like a souk."
And when Adams vetoed a bill that would decriminalize many street vending offenses, he called the issue of illegal street vending a “persistent quality-of-life issue… (that) poses real public health and safety risks.”
Kenny Minaya, commissioner of the Department of Small Business Services, in an interview sounded a different note, calling vendors “our smallest of small businesses,” echoing a phrase used by vendor advocates. He said a “paradigm shift” is needed in the city’s approach to street vending, which he said the city previously viewed as something to be “minimized” and “kept at bay.”
“We really want to unlock the economic potential of street vending in New York City, and we want to have their concerns front-of-mind as well,” Minaya said.
Minaya is naming a head of the new Office of Vendor Services four months ahead of the legally required deadline. The Department of Small Business Services oversees the city’s 78 Business Improvement Districts, which represent the interests of brick-and-mortar businesses that have typically opposed street vendors.
But City Hall is not providing financial figures around the new office. It wasn’t mentioned in the mayor’s or the City Council’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year, which starts in July.
Minaya said the office is intended to have more staff besides Kaufman-Gutierrez, but that conversations about its budget are ongoing with the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget.
When Clio Juarez, 44, began vending Mexican snack foods in Queens in 2021, she said she struggled to figure out the street vending laws and regulations.
“We realized at that time that there was nowhere you could go to ask for information,” Juarez said in Spanish. “Where were you allowed to work? Where could you not work? What could you do? That didn’t exist.”
Juarez said she’s previously faced “undignified treatment” from city officials, who she said have at times refused to get a translator to speak with her.
She added: “With new office, opens a light of hope for all these families.”
This story was updated with additional comment.
