First of two parts
In the daily tumult of a city that is congenitally happy, ugly injustices are bound to leak through, and one of them was more closely examined last night at a neighborhood meeting.
[img]1582|exact|||no_popup[/img]
Street food vending is banned in Los Angeles.
Has been for decades.
Who knew?
I did not.
In a region-by-region countdown, it was the turn of South L.A. residents last evening at the dinner hour to sit down with experts from Forescee Hogan-Rowles’s Community Financial Resource Center and the East L.A. Community Corp., in an effort to come closer, hopefully, to convincing City Hall to overturn the ancient prohibition.
Can He Make It Happen?
Rudy Espinoza, a tall, handsome young man who would be one of the presenters at the meeting in a few minutes, stopped long enough to relate one of the most shameful legacies of our town.
If you think that is hyperbolic, Los Angeles is the only one of America’s 10 largest metropolises to have banished street food vendors, a major defeat for the powerless poor.
While a city-wide campaign is in progress, none of those seeking to reverse decades of prickly history are optimistic about winning in the near-term.
With a major turnover looming on a City Council frequently called inert, this kind of rumbling change probably is too ambitious for risk-averse leaders.
Mr. Espinoza is a senior program officer at the strongly successful non-profit Community Financial Resource Center, a beehive of daily traffic in the shadow of USC.
“My job,” Mr. Espinoza explains, “is to manage local economic development initiatives. I make connections within local communities. My major concentration is around street vending, and also corner stores, helping them get the financing they need to grow.”
Why the prohibition?
Mr. Espinoza is not sure, but one of the hazy historic yarns is that City Hall, in the early days of automobiles, wanted the streets to be made available exclusively for cars to maneuver and to comfortably park.
Street vending always has been part of the sprawling Los Angeles fabric, “but it also has been stigmatized,” he says.
“Oftentimes, low-income communities and people of color have relied on street vendors.
“In days when there was red-lining, when marginalization was common in certain communities, street vending went that way, too, something that was not accepted.”
(To be continued)
