I’m sure you’ve noticed the tents and tables around Lake Merritt, especially on the weekends, where vendors sell items (food, beverages, clothing, cosmetics, jewelry, electronic devices, etc.). They line up along Lakeshore Avenue, wind through the Pergola area and then down Grand Avenue to Bellevue.
Two questions: Do these vendors possess the necessary permits and licenses to conduct sidewalk businesses? And did they legally purchase the things they’re selling, or steal them?
Regarding number one, to legally operate a vending business in Oakland, vendors must secure three items: a mobile vending permit, a business tax certificate, and a California Seller’s Permit, which ensures that the vendor is collecting and paying state sales taxes. Food vendors, in addition, must have safety clearances that can be complicated. Beyond that are numerous other requirements, such as that sidewalk vendors are prohibited from operating within 100 feet of a brick-and-mortar establishment or near a school.
Regarding number two, we know from San Francisco’s experiences, mostly near BART stations on Mission Street, that a great number of these sidewalk vendors are peddling stolen goods. This is known as “fencing,” and San Francisco is trying hard to crack down on it. It seems safe to assume that some or most of the vendors around Lake Merritt are similarly fencing.
This isn’t the biggest problem in Oakland. But it is a problem, and gets to the root cause of so many of the city’s other problems: Oakland’s historic disregard of enforcing the law when it proves inconvenient or politically incorrect. All too often, Oakland permits crime to occur because it’s in the political interests of electeds who run on platforms of racial equity—which is pretty much every politician who’s been elected to anything in the last forty years. For some reason, these people seem to believe that applying the law equally, to everyone, is the equivalent of Jim Crow, and thus cannot be allowed.
There’s a ton of evidence suggesting that Oakland sidewalk vendors seldom possess the required permits and licenses. The overwhelming majority of operating street vendors completely bypass the local permitting system, according to my research. When State laws (SB 946 and SB 972) removed criminal penalties for illegal sidewalk vending, most cities, including Oakland, scaled back on crackdowns. One reason frequently cited by vendors is that the regulations are too difficult to comply with, and so it is both easier and more profitable for them to ignore those regulations and simply do business illegally, secure in the knowledge that officials will never hassle them.
One of my biggest gripes over the years is that in places like Oakland, politicians approve laws and regulations that they know they have no ability or desire to enforce. This wink-wink cynicism allows politicians to claim they’ve “done something” to combat crime, when in reality they’re done nothing but to continue the status quo, which is what their union paymasters want. This mockery of lawmaking undermines the public’s confidence in the law, and is directly related to the anti-police attitude of so many Oaklanders. After all, if they believe that “the law” is simply a racist hurdle thrown in their way to hurt them, then they’re entitled to “resist” the system by ignoring those laws. This “liberation theology” mindset is an anti-social attitude that, when widespread as it is in Oakland, leads to societal disintegration, a Wild West survival of the most predatory and contemptuous. When you factor this contempt for law with a police department that is deliberately underfunded by the very politicians who preach liberation theology, you can see that it’s all connected. Their philosophy is: Screw the law. Screw the defenders of the law, cops. Screw anyone who supports cops. Get elected, and re-elected, and then raise taxes to grease the palms of your co-conspirators. That’s the way we do things in The Town. And that’s why fewer and fewer people and businesses want to be here anymore.
Steve Heimoff