Caridad Vasquez has lived in Los Angeles for 25 years, and sold Mexican food in Boyle Heights for 15 years, but she says she’s never seen anything like the citywide shutdown that the last few weeks have brought.
City leaders effectively put a moratorium on street vending last week, and even before that, many vendors like Vasquez were losing customers as Angelenos increasingly avoided contact with one another and stayed indoors.
With April 1 around the corner, Vasquez, who is 60 years old, says she is growing increasingly worried about herself and other street vendors.
“We’re not going to be able to pay the rent,” Vasquez says, speaking in Spanish.
If she’s safer at home and isn’t supposed to vend, she says: “Where is that money going to come from?”
In the past, community organizing group Inclusive Action for the City has helped street vendors and other “micro-entrepreneurs” by offering small loans and advocating for the legalization of street vending.
The crisis brewing around COVID-19 has changed the way the organization approaches its work. It’s finding new ways to support vendors fearing or facing eviction from their homes and the spaces where they do business, says Inclusive Action executive director Rudy Espinosa.
Inclusive Action is one of close to 200 organizations and groups that are now backing the list of demands laid out by a collective called HealthyLA.
HealthyLA’s vision is for “a strong moratorium on evictions,” rent forgiveness, mortgage suspensions, a residential and commercial rent freeze, paid sick leave, and handwashing stations, showers, and other hygiene support “at every informal settlement” of unhoused people.
The coalition formed about two weeks ago, when a few groups, including Alliance for Community Transit-Los Angeles, Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and LA Voice, were convened by Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin, who wanted their input on his proposed eviction protections and other COVID-19-related relief he would be introducing.
The groups decided to connect on their own beforehand to discuss what issues they’d push for. Bonin and other councilmembers ultimately proposed some of their policy recommendations—but not all of them.
Last week, the council advanced a measure that bans landlords from evicting commercial and residential tenants impacted by COVID-19. Some councilmembers, including Bonin, had wanted that measure to go farther than the eviction moratorium Mayor Eric Garcetti already put in place, but a draft ordinance released today by the city attorney’s office very closely mirrors what the mayor has already done.
Under the the mayor’s moratorium, landlords are barred from evicting tenants who have not paid rent due to COVID-19-related loss of income. The measure also gives tenants six months to repay any rent they owe.
Now there are groups from every council district coming together under the HealthyLA banner, and they’re demanding councilmembers do more to help renters, workers, and the homeless population.
“We knew that... we were going to have to continue pushing to get more of our demands met,” Huerta Jones says.
A street vendor leader with the group Vendedores en Acción, Vasquez says she relies on street vending as her sole source of income. She lives with her daughter, and both of them usually contribute to the rent. Her daughter works in a restaurant and has seen her hours cut; she will also not be able to contribute the amount she normally would.
The mayor’s eviction moratorium requires renters to prove that they were impacted. Vasquez doesn’t know how she’s going to do that.
There’s no official list of the types of documents that suffice as proof, but suggestions from the city’s housing department includes pay stubs and bank statements—paperwork which vendors and other undocumented Angelenos don’t always have.
Huerta Jones says a lot of the demands the collective is making are issues that the city should have addressed “months, if not years ago,” such as rapidly housing homeless residents and aggressively acting to stem evictions.
“I think they’re starting to feel that pressure,” she says.
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