URBAN Rae JUSTICE CENTER March 1, 2017 Scott Millstein, Executive Director Coro New York Leadership Center 42 Broadway, Suite 1827 New York, NY 10004 Dear Mr. Millstein, am a former street vendor and the director of the Street Vendor Project, a worker center at the Urban Justice Center that represents and organizes the thousands of hard-working New Yorkers who sell food and merchandise on our city’s sidewalks each day. I write in reference to your Neighborhood Leadership Program, whose current class includes Isidro Medina, the Deputy Director of the Washington Heights Business Improvement District. Mr. Medina proposed, as part of your leadership training program, to create a task force at the local Community Board to “curtail and eventually clean Washington Heights and North Manhattan of illegal vending.” (On behalf of our city’s vending community, with whom I have worked for the past fifteen years, I denounce Mr. Isidro’s project in the strongest possible terms and object that Coro would accept an applicant who proposed it. Vendors are not dirt to be “cleaned” from our streets. They are low-income workers and entrepreneurs who, through much struggle, support their families and serve our communities by providing inexpensive and convenient food and merchandise. With the overwhelming majority of New York City street vendors being immigrants and people of color, Mr. Isidro's depiction of them is particularly offensive. It hearkens back to a long history of anti-vendor sentiment deeply rooted in racism and xenophobia. A hundred years ago, Italian immigrant and Eastern European Jewish immigrant vendors were called “dirty” and referred to as vermin by some native-born citizens threatened by their presence. Mr. Isidro perpetuates that shameful tradition today through your prestigious leadership program. Editing the most objectionable language from the Coro web site, as has been done, does not change the matter. Beyond the offensive language, Mr. Isidro’s premise is profoundly flawed, Removing street vendors from a neighborhood is a deeply misguided “commercial revitalization” strategy. Vendors are themselves small businesses and vital stakeholders in any commercial corridor where they work, Many researchers have found that vendors have a synergistic relationship with nearby brick-and-mortars. Shopkeepers on Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue learned as much in the late 1990’s, when the local BID lobbied successfully for the removal of vendors there. As documented by Hilary Russ in City Limits, the store owners soon complained that their sales dropped by 20 percent. “The street vendors, it turns out, were one strand in the web of relationships that snared customers and sustained Fulton Street,” she found. 40 RECTOR ST, 9" FLOOR, NY, NY 10006 Ps 646 602 5600 « F: 212 533 4598 * W: URBANJUSTICE.ORG # @urbanjusticeSidewalk Stinvulus, a 2015 study by the Economic Roundtable of Los Angeles reached a similar result. It found that retail stores and restaurants operating in geographic proximity to street vendors (who typically sold different products than the businesses they were near) enjoyed expansion and job growth. In their three case study locations ~ Boyle Heights, Downtown, and Hollywood - they found that brick and mortar businesses were more likely to experience job growth when street vendors were operating nearby. According to your website, the Coro Leadership Center seeks to create a city where power and resources are shared with a broader set of stakeholders. Building leaders to advance agendas like Mr. Isidro has proposed will surely have the opposite effect. It will aggregate power in the hands of the few real estate owners and developers who already have power in Washington Heights. It will make it more difficult for the dozens of immigrant street vendors along St. Nicholas Avenue and Upper Broadway whose voices will continue to be excluded from the decision-making processes that impact their livelihoods, Sincerely, Sean Basinski ce: Hon, Gale Brewer, Manhattan Borough President Hon, Melissa Mark-Viverito, New York City Council Speaker Hon. Ydanis Rodriguez, New York City Council Member, District 10 Hon, Mark Levine, New York City Council Member, District 7 Hon. Carlos Menchaca, New York City Council Member, District 38 Hon. Ritchie Torres, New York City Council Member, District 15 Hon. Gregg Bishop, Commissioner, New York City Department of Small Business Services Mr. Kevin Ryan, Program Director, New York Foundation Mr. Phillip Henderson, President, Surdna Foundation