Municipal officials are doing their best to put a brave face on the problem. Some are not inclined to even discuss the issue while others concede, reluctantly, that the sheer persistence of the offenders has worn down the municipality. Evasive postures and excuses, however, cannot disguise the fact that City Hall appears to have lost its protracted battle with urban street vendors.
The evidence is painfully apparent particularly on Regent and Water streets where the vendors have become more assertive in their encumbering ways and the once vigilant City Police patrols appear to have diminished.
With Christmas approaching one might be inclined to think that the army of vendors occupying the streets and pavements are simply enjoying the customary seasonal immunity. That is not the case. For several months now they have been out in full force and the sheer weight of their numbers appears to have reined in the municipality.
On the one hand the heavy presence of street vendors is indicative of what a private sector official has described as “a heightened entrepreneurial spirit. There is a greater inclination for self-employment,” he says. There are those, however, who argue, that the proliferation of street vendors has had the effect of entangling the urban commercial culture. The store owners have learnt to live with and, in some respects, even embrace vendors plying their trade outside their business places. It is as much a matter of putting up with the vendors as it is cheerfully accommodating them. There is resignation, a feeling of loss of control in their responses to questions about street vending. City Hall, they say, on account of its failure to arrest the problem, has compelled an awkward accommodation.
Some of the vendors have not altogether embraced the opportunities afforded to rise above pedaling their wares on the streets. Over the past three to four years two relatively large shopping have been opened in proximity in the commercial area. The first, the Water Street Vendors Arcade is occupied by more than 100 small businesses. The Stelling View Arcade, opened last Saturday, accommodates 66. Many of the current occupants of the two facilities are one-time street vendors who have invested heavily in stepping up their entrepreneurial pursuits.
The problem is, however, that the streets have always provided better access to the market and the stallholders in both arcades understand this. What they do therefore is to run dual enterprises, one that nestles in the more convivial environment of the arcades and a second that responds to the quick dollar the streets provide.
If this may make perfect sense for the vendors – some of whom are believed to use their shuttered stalls inside the arcades as storage space for goods stored on the streets – it affects the commercial culture in various ways. The most important of these has to do with the pressure which City Hall comes under from the arcade businesses that do not otherwise operate from the streets. Street vending is killing arcade enterprise, at least so the occupants of the arcades say.
Both the vendors and the stall owners blame the problem on City Hall. In sum they believe the municipality lacks the political will to break the cycle of street vending. That apart, the vendors admit that their continued presence on the streets and pavements has been facilitated by a worsening corruption. Some claim that the City Police are concerned only about how the irregularity can benefit them personally.
No end to the problem of street vending appears to be in sight though municipal officials say that more sites have been identified for the erection of arcades. Somehow, however, you sense that City Hall is only too well aware that the rapidly growing population of urban street vendors is now much more than it can handle.
