Portland City Councilor Mitch Green is introducing a proposal that would make it easier for sidewalk food vendors to operate in the city. The ordinance would remove city requirements that prevent vendors from operating outside similar businesses, such as restaurants, and without getting consent from adjacent property owners to operate on the sidewalk.
Green says easing the regulations could give small businesses a boost, but restaurant advocates say sidewalk vendors could hurt businesses that are still struggling to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. OPB’s Portland city government reporter Alex Zielinski joins us to talk about the proposed ordinance and more.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. If Portland City Councilor Mitch Green has his way, there could be more sidewalk food vendors in the city. Green is introducing a proposal today that would make it easier for these vendors to operate. The ordinance would remove city requirements that prevent vendors from operating outside similar businesses, and they could do so without getting consent from adjacent property owners. Green says easing these regulations could give small businesses a boost. But restaurant owners say these vendors might have the opposite effect on their own bottom lines.
OPB’s Portland city government reporter Alex Zielinski joins us to talk about the proposed ordinance and more. Welcome back to the show.
Alex Zielinski: Hi, Dave.
Miller: How did City Council Member Mitch Green first get interested in hot dog carts?
Zielinski: It’s a great origin story that goes back to 2007 when Green was fresh out of the army and studying economics at Portland State University. He wanted to start his own business and was inspired when he came across a hot dog cart for sale on Craigslist. He bought it for around $1,200 bucks, but then he hit a wall. He learned that the city requires street vendors to get permission from adjacent buildings to operate.
He wanted to open it outside his apartment complex in Northwest Portland, but his property owner rejected the idea. So this basically was the end of the road for his vending dreams. And just looking around Portland, you can tell it’s kept a lot of people from running sidewalk carts in general. So now, nearly two decades later and inside city government, Green wants to change these policies that hamstrung him back then.
Miller: Has anything changed since then? I mean, what are the rules that govern sidewalk vendors today?
Zielinski: Not much has changed. So along with the rule that I mentioned around needing consent from the nearby property, street vendors are prohibited from operating outside of a similar business, like a flower vendor setting up outside of a florist shop. There are also rules around following ADA, not blocking the entire sidewalk with your cart, letting folks pass by, and of course health inspection rules for any place that serves food.
Miller: How different are other city’s approaches? I mean, I’m thinking about so many hot dog vendors or pretzel vendors in New York City?
Zielinski: On the West Coast, Seattle has some specific vending and no vending zones. The no vending zones are in the most bustling downtown areas. So they say, OK, you can vend, but [only] in places where there isn’t a ton of competition. But like you mentioned, New York City, which is maybe the most ubiquitous with hotdog stands and flower stands, has rules around not having carts within, I think it’s like, 20 feet or so of other businesses, so that competition doesn’t seem so direct. But my understanding is that this is something cities have struggled to regulate, beyond Portland. It’s a bigger thing.
Miller: What exactly is Green’s proposal right now?
Zielinski: It would undo those two rules I mentioned about property owner consent and not having similar items being sold outside of business. It would also allow vendors to operate in the residential neighborhoods that aren’t zoned for commercial business, meaning that a brick and mortar business can’t operate there but maybe a food cart could.
Miller: Where is the loudest opposition so far coming from?
Zielinski: Unsurprisingly, it’s a lot of business advocacy groups, specifically the restaurant industry. So we know restaurants in Portland, and frankly across the country, have struggled to rebound after the pandemic. With so many folks working from home, downtown restaurants saw a huge dip in business. And that’s been hard to bounce back from, especially since so many people are still working remotely. So these business advocates argue that this competition will only hurt businesses while they’re just barely beginning to come back.
Miller: You also talked to Margo Childs, the owner of a brick and mortar shop called Franks-A-Lot on Burnside. What did you hear from her?
Zielinski: This is my neighborhood hot dog shop. So I will say I was a little starstruck.
Miller: Maybe she was starstruck talking to you.
Zielinski: [Laughs] Who knows? But she was of two minds. First, she said she’d be a bit annoyed if a hot dog cart selling maybe cheaper hot dogs opened up on the sidewalk outside of her business. But at the same time, she said she’s always dreamed of opening a Franks-A-Lot sidewalk cart and taking it to the sidewalks outside of city parks. [That] currently isn’t allowed because of the zoning rules that I mentioned, that Green’s proposal would change but could happen if this went through.
Miller: So in a sense the general arguments here are about both a fear of unfair, super close competition, and then the general sense that a lot of existing restaurants are already struggling and this could make it harder for them to survive. What are the counterarguments from supporters?
Zielinski: Supporters say that removing this red tape would help small businesses take off and that this is actually a way to jumpstart Portland’s lagging economy after the pandemic, especially downtown. Having street vendors operating would increase foot traffic downtown – which has been a slow-to-recover metric – while also creating jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities … that this is kind of what Portland does best, the scrappy DIY stuff.
Several people I spoke with compared this to the early days of food carts in Portland. A decade or so ago, restaurants were so fearful of competition with these crazy new things, food carts, opening. But we’ve now seen so many of these carts turn into beloved brick and mortar restaurants and see them as this launching pad rather than a competition.
Miller: How would things like safety inspections work?
Zielinski: That’s handled by the county health department and they told me they haven’t sat down to crunch the numbers on how this policy would really impact their workload. But if the proposal leads to an increase in vendors, it undoubtedly would increase the amount of inspections that need to happen. So that’s an unknown and it might mean they’ll have to hire some more folks at the county.
Miller: What’s the timeline for this proposal right now?
Zielinski: It was introduced in committee this morning, which means it still will need to go to the full council and then have another reading after that. So my guess is that something would probably be finalized by the end of fall, if it gets the support it needs.
Miller: You put out a photo today on social media of somebody in a hot dog suit at this meeting, giving Council Member Green a hot dog. Do you know if his proposal has support from any of his fellow council members? Can he get to seven?
Zielinski: You know, I’m not sure. There’s tentative support from fellow progressives. At this meeting today, there wasn’t much time for councilors to actually debate and discuss. It was more a chance for public testimony and silly stunts, like having a person in a hotdog suit deliver you a hotdog. But it’s interesting because this whole issue hits on one of the top issues councilors say they want to address across the board, [which is]making it easier to do business in Portland. But it could come at the expense of other businesses. So it’ll be interesting to see how councilors walk the line and what support looks like, once it lands before the full 12-person council.
Miller: Speaking of the 12-person council, when Portland voters expanded the city council, I think I was expecting more proposals like this one. Not more proposals about hot dog carts in particular, but just more idiosyncratic initiatives from this broader set of elected officials. And maybe I haven’t been paying attention enough, but has that happened?
Zielinski: You’re right. I would love to share all the whimsical ordinance ideas I’ve heard floated from different city councilors since January. But so few of them have even made it to committee. A lot of them fizzled out just because of the huge workload that this new council has before them. If you remember, much of the first half of this year was spent navigating a very challenging budget season and budget plan. And now there’s a big focus on responding to federal policies that could hurt Portlanders and the city’s economy.
But yes, I think you’re right. There’s an appetite from councilors and from the public to advance some more unique, maybe peculiar policies that help them rise above the others. But so much of it so far has been forced to the back burner, until after the dust of this new government and the federal impacts on this government has settled.
Miller: And then there’s also the really dire economic stuff. So before we say goodbye, I just want to turn briefly, to the bigger city picture. Last week, City Administrator Michael Jordan announced a hiring and overtime freeze for many city bureaus – not the public safety ones but most of the others – because of an unexpected budget shortfall of more than $12 million, just a few months after the council passed the budget for the current fiscal year, which started just in July. What happened?
Zielinski: Much of what the budget season is about, usually, is balancing hypothetical money or anticipated money, whether that’s from the federal government, or state or local taxes. So while Council adopted a budget in June, like you mentioned, a lot of that money they had hoped would close their budget gaps wasn’t in hand yet because of different timelines. That $12 million you mentioned, is the gap in what the city anticipated it would collect in business tax revenues this year and then didn’t. So now it has to scramble to fill that hole and figure out what could patch it.
Miller: Alex, thanks very much.
Zielinski: Thanks for having me.
Miller: Alex Zielinski reports on Portland city government for OPB.
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