WSJ:
Every week it seems New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg takes to the radio to pontificate about our lousy diets, gripe about our sinister smoking habits, and promote his latest utopian health scheme. Responding to a recent listener complaint about excessively loud ice-cream trucks, Mr. Bloomberg shifted to another culinary malefactor in need of City Hall’s attention: the gourmet food truck. “The little [food] stand is now getting to be these enormous trucks with generators . . . and they take up parking places and they block traffic.”
It’s no surprise that the mayor who required fast-food restaurants to display the caloric content of every menu item would declaim food trucks. But while New Yorkers barely reacted to calorie counting with a shrug, the popular haute-cuisine trucks, where the adventurous eater can find gianduia-flavored ice cream, Korean “tacos,” and BBQ pulled pork Belgian waffles, is a rather different matter.
The business of selling street food doesn’t lack for regulation. In Manhattan—and most cities in the U.S.—the legal proscriptions governing food trucks are baffling, and the barriers to entry for new businesses predictably onerous. To sell food cooked in a truck, one must possess a vendor license. But the city caps these at around 3,000, with a waiting list just as long. And with sometimes as few as a dozen new licenses dispersed in a year (via a lottery system), for most this means waiting a dozen years to start a legal operation.
Baylen Linnekin, executive director of Keep Food Legal, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group devoted to “culinary freedom,” says that the regulatory hurdles faced by truck owners ensure the creation of an underground economy. Because the City Council has so limited the number of permits, often “the only way to open up a new truck is to pay a bribe and buy a permit on the black market.” While it’s technically illegal to resell permits, Mr. Linnekin estimates that over half the city’s trucks either “rent” or purchase permits, which can cost upwards of $20,000.
When I lived in NYC, I was a huge fan of food trucks. And you never met a harder working group of folks than those that man some of these trucks. Government should be making it easier for people that want to make an honest living, not eliminating it.