Add The California Post on Google Doesn’t this just make you sick to your stomach?
LA Mayor Karen Bass has fired the latest distasteful salvo at brick-and-mortar restaurants by ordering the LAPD to stop issuing citations to street food vendors who break the law.
It is a cost-of-living story, a neighborhood story and a fairness story, served with extra lime and a mayor who happens to be running for reelection.
Bass’ new sales pitch: “Forget the dining room; eat on the sidewalk.”
Start with your bill. Sit-down food in California got expensive for a bevy of reasons. One of them: Licensed and permitted restaurants pay rent, taxes and insurance that can cost thousands of dollars before the first plate heads to your table.
Meanwhile, special treatment for cheap, greasy, bacon-wrapped calories is being sold as compassion.
Without permitting and food-safety regulations enforced, they’re more like Third World sprawl on LA sidewalks.
Then look at your block. Restaurants were one of the last machines that brought paychecks to dishwashers, line cooks, immigrants and failed actors –– and sometimes turned them into owners.
Then notice the rules: Two food businesses can serve the same customer on the same street under two tax-and-inspection regimes.
That’s why the rest of this story has teeth.
A licensed kitchen can be perilous. Cut a corner and the city can fine you, sue you or padlock the walk-in fridge.
Of the 50,000 vendors hawking food in LA, just 53 had permits for food sales as of September 2024.
Carts also skip rent, bathrooms, hot water and the payroll machinery that restaurants cannot dodge.
Then the city buys them equipment — and announces it is “free.” That’s precious, because the money came from the same tax base that keeps the brick-and-mortar lights on.
The politics arrived “extra spicy.” A gubernatorial hopeful Xavier Becerra — a former health secretary — tells Californians to skip the restaurant and eat at the cart that his regulatory universe helped make cheaper.
Mayor Bass, locked in a runoff with Councilwoman Nithya Raman, puts the quiet part on the list of specials: She stands firmly with street vendors.
LAPD, at her direction, will stop criminal citations and dismiss those issued “in error”; hundreds of thousands this year have already gone out to sidewalk carts. She adds that this matters “given ongoing attacks by ICE.”
So Bass serves up politics in lieu of rules intended to ensure public safety. Great.
Meanwhile, in another interview she frowns at vendors setting up in front of restaurants.
Nithya Raman does taco-stand events and talks about getting more vendors properly permitted.
Bass answers with cart money, citation amnesty and anti-ICE posturing.
That is not a dog whistle. It is a bullhorn aimed at immigrant neighborhoods, vendor networks and voters who hear “citation” and think “cruelty.”
Restaurant owners vote, too. They just look a bit too polished for an LA campaign video. Better a folding table at golden hour.
Sink your teeth into reality and the romance curdles.
The city still has enforcement tools: administrative tickets, health rules, don’t-block-the-sidewalk rules, don’t-camp-in-the-tenant’s-doorway rules. Bass’ choosing not to use them, while branding unpermitted carts the “quintessential” food scene, is not compassion. It is preferential treatment.
Licensed kitchens take the full crunch of labor law — while unpermitted tents get the positive press release.
Public health is not a metaphor, even if campaigns treat it like one. Permanent sinks exist because food poisoning does not RSVP. A former health secretary cheering operations that often lack basic sanitation is not folksy. It is a tell.
Nobody asked the mayor to become the health inspector’s enemy. You can let people sell tacos on the sidewalk without acting like a meat thermometer is a hate crime. Food either stays cold or it doesn’t. Bacteria do not care about your press conference.
You can also help a vendor get a cart without picking the restaurant’s pocket to underwrite the stall parked on its doorstep. That isn’t “investment in small business.” That’s making the tenant finance the pop-up that’s eating his lunch rush.
And you can talk about ICE without using it as a smoke bomb. Immigration enforcement is a real fight. It is not a magic trick that makes the double standard disappear.
Same street curb. Same hungry customer. One business pays for rent, payroll and inspections. The other gets applause, public carts and a lighter touch from the cops.
Calling the second one “culture” does not make the first one a villain. It just tells everyone which set of rules City Hall is willing to enforce.
We were told this was about immigrants building lives. Many already did so the unfashionable way: Leased a box, paid the plumber, hired on the books.
The new gospel treats that path as optional and the shortcut as identity — especially in an election year, when identity photographs well.
Los Angeles still has teeth. Bass would like another term to decide where they sink. Watch whose plates she protects, and whose dinner she is happy to ruin.
Richie Greenberg is a political commentator.
