Santa Ana is waging war on the produce vendors who cruise residential streets serving immigrant renters. This is a huge convenience for those without cars or even drivers’ licenses, who would otherwise have to ride the bus with kids in tow to a supermarket.
It seems homeowners in nearby upscale neighborhoods are concerned about their property values. What else is new? This is Southern California. They complain that the trucks park on the street in front of apartment buildings, sometimes all day.
So after two years of debate, the city’s answer is to pave the parkways between curb and sidewalk for customers of the rolling markets. The city wants to charge vendors a $2,000 fee for exclusive rights to one of the 150 proposed spots. Parkway landscaping would give way to more concrete. This is a solution?
Every year or so, Southern California cities grapple with the independent vendor issue, cracking down on pushcart peddlers of everything from ice cream to tacos. In most cases, the areas they serve have limited resources, poorly stocked neighborhood stores and inadequate transportation to larger markets. Some vendors have been driven out of their own neighborhoods because their budding entrepreneurship offends longtime residents or business owners.
Show me a major city anywhere in the world, and I’ll show you food vendors sharing sidewalks with hotels, office buildings and shops with apartments (many high-rent or owner occupied) above. It’s called multiuse zoning and seems to work everyplace but Southern California.
Inner city residents complain that existing convenience stores don’t sell good produce; that they have to take an hour bus ride to buy an apple. That’s because merchants go for the easy buck; selling packaged food, soda, candy and chips supplied to them by a distributor. Why should they bother going to the wholesale produce market at the crack of dawn to buy fresh fruit when they can make more money for less effort selling junk?
They say they’re just giving people what they want, but I think it’s the other way around. People buy what they stock because that’s all there is.
When I was growing up in Beverly Hills, it was a short walk or streetcar ride to Carl’s Market on Doheny Drive or the Premier Market in the center of town, which delivered groceries, ordered by telephone and billed customers by the month. To supplement these conveniences, we had a daily parade of vendors: the Good Humor Man, Helm’s Bakery, the milkman, the ice man and the greengrocer. Their trucks would be parked in front of every other house while they carried their products to the front porch or the kitchen door.
The ringing of the Good Humor truck’s bell could be heard a half block away, giving us time to get coins from the cook or our nanny and run out to the curb before it got to our house. Before I was old enough to go to school, this was often the high point of my day. But almost as exciting was the produce truck driver, a soft-spoken Japanese gentleman who sold the freshest fruit and vegetables, much of which he and his family had grown on a small farm just outside town. Cook would come out to pick exactly what she needed from rows of brightly colored plums, apples, cabbages, Brussels sprouts and slender carrots with their feathery tops still on. The plums would decorate a dense vanilla cake, the apples made strudel, cabbage leaves were steamed and stuffed with meat or shredded with carrots for slaw.
This must have been what sparked my lifelong love of cooking and appreciation for the freshest food. You see, even in our upscale neighborhood, the food vendors were treasured. No one ever dreamed of complaining that they were ruining property values. We all had cars to drive to the market, but that wasn’t the point. Our town was a movie town in the ’30s and ’40s, enriched by the talent of European refugees, who were welcomed into the industry and so were tolerant of other immigrants.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, things began to change. Japanese Americans just disappeared; we weren’t told where they went. All of the gardeners were rounded up by the Feds early one morning, and that was the last we saw of the produce truck and the lovely man who would give me a tangerine or a peach after Cook had paid and gone back to the house. Little did I know she and her husband (still German citizens) would be the next to go. But not until after she helped me plant a victory garden.
It was a shameful way for us to treat honest hard working immigrants, but it seems much hasn’t changed. Newcomers still work as cooks and nannies or become independent vendors serving immigrant neighborhoods. And homeowners on adjacent streets will complain to their city councils that the trucks are a nuisance, or the street vendors are a security risk.
But paving over the parkways and charging thousands of dollars in fees for the privilege of serving neighbors makes no sense. How will this uphold already inflated property values?
What Santa Ana could use is a change of attitude. If we’re going to reap the benefits of immigrant labor and a vibrant, multicultural society, we need to think more about assimilation and less about exclusion. This country has thrived on the efforts of those who came here to study and work.
Reward their enterprise, Santa Ana! Don’t let a few insecure homeowners drive them away. And please, California doesn’t need any more concrete parkways.