Mobilizing Food Vending with Ginette Wessel

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Transcript for Mobilizing Food Vending

0:00:08.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts lectures, where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website, shareable.net, just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities@Tufts Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:40.2 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tuft’s Virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman, and together with my research assistants, Amelia Morton and Grant Perry and our partners Shareable and the Barr Foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative, which recognizes Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on Colonized, Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today we are delighted to host Dr. Ginette Wessel, who is associate Professor of Architecture at Roger Williams University.

0:01:19.0 Julian Agyeman: She teaches courses in urban design, urban planning, and environmental design research. As an urbanist designer and scholar, Ginette has published articles in the Journal of the American Planning Association, as well as chapters in my book, Food Trucks, Cultural Identity and Social Justice, and a chapter in participatory urbanisms. Her forthcoming book, which I’m sure she’s gonna tell us all about, is called Mobilizing Food Vending, Gourmet Food Trucks in the American City. And that’s coming out apparently next month through Routledge. It investigates food trucks rights and resiliency in the urban food scape using ethnography, policy analysis and spatial interpretation. Ginette’s research interests include current social and cultural transformations that are underway in city making with an emphasis on public space, social equity, and communication technology. Ginette’s talk today is mobilizing food vending, planning and policy for gourmet food trucks in the American city. Ginette, a fantastic welcome to Cities@Tufts. Over to you.

0:02:31.0 Ginette Wessel: Thank you, Julian. I’m very excited and delighted to be here, and thank you for everyone to come and listen to the talk today. My title of my talk, as Julian mentioned, is Mobilizing Food Vending, Planning and Policy for Gourmet Food Trucks in the American City. And I first really became interested in food trucks back in 2008 when I was doing my doctorate work and I found myself really intrigued by their growing presence around the San Francisco Bay Area. And their ability to mobilize, using social media and activate urban space was really something quite novel to me and unfamiliar. And little did I know I would spend about 16 years following the industry, but here we are and I have a new book to share with you, that talks about that. So let me get my slide moving here.

0:03:27.1 Ginette Wessel: So in my book, I use a spatial lens to question how food trucks navigate social structures of power in cities and contribute to the evolution of urban space. I look at Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Charlotte, and I examine how agency among usually disproportionately powerful actors unfold spatially in the act of claiming rights to urban space. I also examine how social life is generated in urban spaces with the help of communication technology and mobility. And further, I incorporate a firsthand study of space to understand how food truck locations play a role in the public realm of the capitalist city. I confront as well problems facing food trucks, due to rising property values and shifts in the real estate market. So in this book, I question if food truck’s spontaneous ability to overcome time and space is an indicator of a wider bottom-up transformation of how urban space and social life are generated. How will cities adapt and react to food trucks and how should they plan and accommodate them? Who is the gourmet food truck phenomenon, including who’s it excluding? And what about food trucks helps to diversify the city and support a more equitable city?

0:04:49.9 Ginette Wessel: So in this book, I argue that mobile food vending offers a window into a wider urban transformation, in which urban space has become part of a social and economic system reliant on mobility and technology for success. And that’s a new urban process that has become really fundamental to society’s social landscape and neoliberal economy. So the talk today is gonna follow this sequence. I first wanna talk a little bit about the origins, then I wanna shift into some theory that supports the framework for my work. I wanna look at a series of vignettes, about displacement, bottom-up policymaking, pandemic resiliency, and then we’ll look at some of the benefits and drawbacks and then a planner’s toolkit.

0:05:39.2 Ginette Wessel: So Roy Choi, Korean-American, professionally trained chef had just left his job at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and had a sleepless night. He began experimenting with Mexican and Korean flavors and created a short rib taco made with warm corn tortillas, the Korean barbecue beef or bulgogi, salsa Roja, cilantro, onion, lime, relish, slaw, and chili soy vinaigrette. Without enough money to open a storefront, Choi decided to sell his $2 tacos out of a food truck. His friend Mark Manguera quickly brokered a deal with a local commissary owner for a used catering truck. And he called his sister Alice Shin, who was a writer in New York City to manage the customer relations. Manguera, his wife Caroline, her brother Eric and Choi, bought $250 worth of food and trained for one week and began serving Korean barbecue tacos on Sunset Boulevard. Together the team of friends and family established the Kogi barbecue food truck, which made stops in South Los Angeles, Hollywood, and Koreatown and their initial vending locations had really predictable foot traffic, but were surprisingly unsuccessful.

0:06:55.3 Ginette Wessel: And then in December of that year, the team tweeted and parked outside a co-op housing unit at UCLA during final exams week, and 1000 students lined up for tacos. Choi’s recalls that was the turning point for their business. And the truck grew steadily with crowds up to 500 people within the first three months grossing nearly $2 million in that first year. And the food trucks customer base grew rapidly, both through word of mouth, but also Twitter really launching Choi into a leader of culinary experimentation. The team soon added Roja, Verde and Aranka, which served different areas of Los Angeles County, and Rosita was used for special events. And following the success of Kogi food truck imitators emerged almost immediately, each one trying to recapture Choi’s mix of fusion street food and street smarts. In 2008, a variety of unique converging factors led to the perfect moment to start a food truck business.

0:08:00.4 Ginette Wessel: For one, the economic downturn in 2008 and the subsequent decrease in consumer spending, diminished sit-down restaurant sales and made the purchase or the maintenance of a brick-and-mortar restaurant impossible for many. Chefs found food trucks to be more financially feasible option for supporting existing restaurants or starting a new business. And food truck ownership and leases grew among the under and unemployed populations across US cities. While clever food entrepreneurs sustained their livelihoods with food trucks, they also introduced a new competitive dining model to the American public. At the same time in 2008, the social media website, Twitter, which is now called X, was just 2-years-old, and it was growing in popularity among young adults. And by alerting customers to the day’s plans with a simple tweet, chefs could visit different locations with the assurance that their customers could find them. This new mode of finding food was also a fun engaging activity for food truck fans who really enjoyed seeking out new foods at impromptu locations.

0:09:12.1 Ginette Wessel: And so also another critical factor in 2008 is also thinking about food trucks and mobility, which was certainly helpful for the industry’s success. The mobility that a food truck has, really affords vendors the flexibility to change locations if business is slow or if demand is picking up in a specific location. Mobility is characteristically an American phenomenon, one that has been deeply embedded in the country’s economy and American everyday life for over a century. And more recently, mobility has been leveraged to create new economic sectors, such as on demand shopping and food delivery businesses that really cater to where people live and work. Food trucks mobility challenges also established planning ideologies, which generally address economic growth and consumer dining through very fixed and predictable business locations.

0:10:15.4 Ginette Wessel: So this calculable process of development usually allows governments to easily regulate and monitor business activity within the formal market system. In order for food trucks to align with those existing regulatory processes, governments actually require food truck owners to submit a very detailed vending schedule or operate a GPS device for surveillance. Fundamentally, mobility afforded by the food trucks temporarily activates urban space with social life, providing more opportunities for the public to socialize or take a break from work. Aside from organized special events, food trucks frequently appear in underused marginal spaces of cities of which many are privately owned. As opposed to the celebrated downtown centers, these spaces are typically a distance from restaurants or have fewer regulations. And these unfamiliar spaces also reveal the unbalanced priorities of cities, which typically focus on economically productive space, new development, or automobile circulation. Food trucks informally provide opportunities to strengthen the public realm by converting the once auto dominated spaces into more active pedestrian hubs. And food trucks also blur clear social and political boundaries of urban space, by carving out spaces for the public on private land.

0:11:49.4 Ginette Wessel: Food trucks are also attractive to customers because each visit includes a culturally charged experience. The marriage of Korean and Mexican flavors created a specific consumer connection for the Kogi food truck. Whereas over the 20th century when we were talking about cooking French or Mexican or Chinese or Italian food, that really meant providing Americans with a very well-known and easily recognizable dish reminiscent of a particular culture.

0:12:19.5 Ginette Wessel: Kogi’s Korean barbecue tacos are inventive, they’re original, and they’re cooked with ingredients that showcase Choi’s ethnic background in culinary expertise. Chefs also bring with them global influences to urban spaces through vibrant food truck branding as well as the music, all of which play and have a powerful effect on how we recognize other cultures, whether they’re real or constructed identities. And many food trucks chefs have trained in culinary kitchens across the globe, experienced transnational mobility throughout their lives, and created popular dishes that incorporate those indigenous ingredients sometimes combining them to create new fusion foods. And as food truck customers seek out or outdoor food experiences, they’re also immersing themselves in the flavors and the ambiance of distant cultures.

0:13:15.5 Ginette Wessel: Kogi food trucks are unique, in that they intentionally seek out diverse social classes in both affluent business centers and low income communities in LA. Their menu is priced affordably at $3 a taco, making the food attainable for many Angelenos. And these lower price points help attract loyal customers whose regular presence allows that truck to keep the prices low. However, very few food trucks can maintain lower prices, given the complexity of the menu or the operational costs in their region. It’s not uncommon for food trucks to exclude low income groups with prices ranging from 15 to $30 a person. The great recession of 2008, the convenience and rising popularity of social media, and the renewed desire to engage in the public realm of cities led to the birth of the US gourmet food truck movement. Over time, the food truck industry has steadily grown with the exception of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and expanded to mid-size cities and small towns.

0:14:20.0 Ginette Wessel: And as of 2023, there are more than 47,000 food truck businesses nationwide, and that industry is now worth approximately about $2.2 billion. Mobile food trucks are an important topic to study because their presence can be an indication of a changing urban landscape that reconfigures the social, the cultural, the economic, and the physical contours of cities. Moreover, as communication technology is part of our everyday life, and proximity is less of a factor in customers’ decision making shifts in how urban space is consumed and produced really should be carefully considered.

0:15:03.6 Ginette Wessel: So, let’s keep moving here. All right. So historically government officials have resisted street food vending on the grounds that it supports unsanitary food practices, it congests streets, it weakens business for brick-and-mortar establishments, contributes to crime, and is part of a low income sector. Unfavorable views of vendors have reinforced the mid 20th century modernist planning and design ideals that were about creating clear order, automobile-centered city streets and doing away with activities perceived as inefficient or unproductive.

0:15:44.9 Ginette Wessel: In the 1970s, concerns over the oversaturation of vendors in New York City prompted a 3000 vendor permit cap, which in turn tripled the cost of the permits and produced a black market. The treatment of vendors historically is rooted in a belief that their presence is an informal practice with little contribution to the formal economy. In 2009, municipalities were taken by surprise, really with the rapid growth of food trucks, which forced them to revisit the outdated and often irrelevant vending regulations.

0:16:21.6 Ginette Wessel: The lack of effective regulations allowed food trucks a bit more freedom in finding locations, enabling a faster expansion of the industry. But however, food trucks soon learned that regardless of whether they’re conducting business in a public right of way or on private land, they’re gonna draw a debate from a variety of social groups that are economically or socially motivated. And food trucks relationships with cities and municipal government, and other food sectors has fluctuated over time in terms of its acceptance or resistance, but I would say overall increasingly favorable as the customer demand continues to this day.

0:17:04.7 Ginette Wessel: So let’s talk a little bit of theory. I’m gonna look at Philosopher Michel de Certeau’s concept of strategic and tactical spatial practices, which are particularly relevant to understanding the spectrum of power or lack thereof in the mobile food vending industry. Regarding the tactical spatial practices, Certeau states, “Tactics are a clever utilization of time, of the opportunities it presents, and also to the play it introduces in the foundations of power.” He emphasizes that participants in the city who live in transverse adapt, alter in appropriate space, make it their own. And food trucks perform tactical spatial practices, finding opportunities within the urban landscape and adapting to new changes. Similarly, Philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the oeuvre perfectly frames food, trucks, social production of urban space. And oeuvre is an urban milieu in that is participatory in nature within which urban citizens have a right to appropriate and modify their environment.

0:18:21.7 Ginette Wessel: And oeuvre is a realm of everyday life, an opportunity for play and social exchange in the city, rather than a space with the functional purpose of making profit. To the benefit of residents, food trucks offer opportunities to remake the city as an accessible and livable social space. They are nimble, flexible, and self-organizing. And however, they’re often subject to regulatory controls or strategic spatial practices which observe, measure, and control vendors determining their inclusion or exclusions from government’s total vision of urban space.

0:19:03.7 Ginette Wessel: So I would like to review a few of them. Notably proximity bans, which are advocated by restaurant owners, proximity bans are among the most common examples of strategic spatial practices limiting their opportunity. Supporters of the bands argue the presence of vendors creates direct competition, and therefore vendors should be distanced from restaurants to protect their profits. The protectionist views often align with the interest of local politicians and council members, who leverage their decision making power to promote or to protect or improve economic development in the area, which is often defined by property taxpayers.

0:19:47.0 Ginette Wessel: Some municipalities, such as Chicago, Boston, and even Cranston, Rhode Island, have begun monitoring food locations by requiring them to place GPS locator in their vehicles. Restrictions that contain vendors to districts or ban them from public property or limit the amount of time they can stop and wait in one location also serve as examples of powerful interests really seeking to gain from regulating food trucks. The complexity, the type, and the degree of regulation enforcement in the US depends on the local municipality and its residents.

0:20:30.3 Ginette Wessel: Strategies that are used to regulate food vendors can be categorized, as I’ve done here, as acts of spatial exclusions, things like proximity bans or bans on public and private property, acts of regulating and monitoring behavior, such as putting GPS devices in the trucks, or spatial distancing between vendors, or regulating alcohol consumption and recycling, or acts of enforcing public health standards, such as requiring a commissary or letter grades for the trucks. So, however, food trucks become more powerful and gain more rights when they work collectively as an association or they seek out representation from a supporting advocacy organization, and these groups argue for more equitable regulatory frameworks and fight for vendors’ rights and share best practices. The Southern California Mobile Food Vendors Association is the most legally active group in the US, having sued 13 municipalities for not abiding by the California Vehicle Code, which states that vending regulations for the public right-of-way must address a specific public safety issue.

0:21:48.7 Ginette Wessel: So, for example, in Monterova, California, the city’s ban on food trucks in the Old Town District for reasons of business competition was quickly reversed by a lawsuit. In 2013, as these food truck associations began to grow across the nation, the President Matt Geller, co-founded the National Food Truck Association, along with six other association leaders to support existing food truck associations and build new ones. And the organization represents now about 18 regional associations across the US, and I’d also mention, likewise, the Institute for Justice in Washington DC, which was founded in 1991, and that’s a non-profit public interest law firm. They litigate for food truck vendors, and they’ve organized and filed over a dozen food truck cases across the country, winning most of them and publishing many research reports on how to promote food trucks as small businesses in growing.

0:22:55.4 Ginette Wessel: So, tensions between how we think of tactical and strategic spatial practices are inevitable when public space is at stake and when new food industries emerge in landscapes with established restaurants. The strength of the food truck industry in each city is really determined by that interplay between the bottom-up efforts of food truck vendors, the associations and the advocacy firms, and the top-down regulations that are typically installed by local, county, and state government. So, now I’d like to share a series of vignettes that I think best capture the central debates at play surrounding the gourmet food truck industry.

0:23:37.1 Ginette Wessel: In 2010, the rise of gourmet food trucks on Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile led to a dispute with local restaurant owners at the Museum Square and LA County Art Museum, who argued vendors were encroaching on their business at a time when sales were in decline following the 2008 recession. One restaurant owner stated, the economy’s been so bad I had to cut employees and these trucks show up and I have to cut more. We all average $16,000 in rent and I have to pay employee taxes and alcohol licenses.

0:24:11.4 Ginette Wessel: Supporting the restaurants, District 4 Councilman Tom LaBonge claimed the trucks monopolized parking spaces and he said these trucks parked for multiple hours in a commercially zoned area, contrary to the intent of those metered spaces. Parking meters were designed to encourage turnover of vehicles in high-demand areas. Soon, junk cars began appearing to occupy the available spaces for trucks and LaBonge proposed two alternatives to City Council, either restrict trucks from commercial zones or create designated zones for them.

0:24:50.4 Ginette Wessel: The food truck vendors saw LaBonge’s proposal as short-sighted and in violation of the same code that upheld the earlier People versus Garcia-Lonchera court case, which found that local regulations can only be enacted for matters of public safety. Accordingly, LaBonge expanded his argument and claimed that the trucks blocked visibility of drivers on Wilshire Boulevard. A local food truck advocate turned to Twitter, spread the news about the debate on a Friday in 2010, asking the community to contact LaBonge with concerns. A Facebook page titled Los Angelinos Against LaBonge described him as a friend of the celebrity and a foe of a small businessman. And by the next Monday, LaBonge’s phone and inbox were flooded and the backlash postponed the measure for two years, allowing the trucks to continue business if they located an empty parking space.

0:25:44.3 Ginette Wessel: In December 2012, Los Angeles City Council approved two restrictions for the area. Food trucks larger than 22 feet long and 7 feet high were prohibited from parking with oversized vehicle restrictions along 15 blocks of Wilshire Boulevard. And second, oversized vehicle parking was prohibited from bisecting streets entirely. These restrictions, still in place as of today, reduced the number of potential parking spaces by half, from 40 to 20. And food truck advocates claim that the lack of visibility has not been proven and argue that the new regulations were a way of balancing competing interests and not having to take sides. The vendors feel the real losers are the customers who have more limited lunchtime options. So the restaurants argue that by selling food in the vicinity of their locations, food trucks are unfairly luring customers away from their establishments.

0:26:52.7 Ginette Wessel: However, the several court cases really have no evidence to support that. And much of the case law has been established by longer running Loncheras. 1978, another case where there was the banning of sale of viticules on public streets with within 100 feet of a brick and mortar establishment. And after Loncheras fought this ordinance, it was ruled that the regulation discriminated economically against catering truck operations. So that’s important to realize that the Loncheras had such an incredible role in laying a foundation. Some restaurant owners have been more inclined to embrace, actually, the food truck activity and found ways to reinvent or boost their business.

0:27:37.1 Ginette Wessel: So for instance, the owners of the Lennon ru restaurant in the HBO Hulu campus in Santa Monica realized that they could not stop food trucks from parking near the campus and instead lowered their prices and changed their menu with a different offering each day. Their new business model responded to the consumer demand and have more to go options. So from the perspective of mobile food vendors, restaurants constitute an entirely different market that offers dining space and restrooms in a climate controlled environment.

0:28:11.9 Ginette Wessel: The person who’s going to the food truck isn’t going to it over a restaurant, they’re making an active choice to go. Even so, many vendors are aware of restaurant complaints and make an effort to really avoid areas with the established restaurant scene. And in the end, consumers are driving the market and today they want more options and more access to foods that are inexpensive, inventive, and healthy.

0:28:36.9 Ginette Wessel: So my second vignette illustrates the vulnerability of food trucks at bottom-up food truck rallies in Charlotte, North Carolina. Two years after Kogi had been serving the streets of West Hollywood and they were really popular in major cities across the US, they just started emerging in Charlotte at office parks and breweries on the outskirts of the city. When Kelly Kierson arrived in Charlotte in 2010, she was eager for her own business and found that the startup cost of a truck were too high and the city’s regulations were not friendly.

0:29:13.6 Ginette Wessel: In May of 2011, Kierson started her roaming for food business in a refurbished equipment trailer and began contacting property owners at major office parks in Ballantyne and South Park. Two months into her search, she began building a relationship with Gaines Brown, a local property owner with a passion for growing the arts culture in the South End. Brown owned a vacant lot sparsely covered in grass at the intersection of Camden Road and Park Avenue. He purchased the lot in the 1980s as part of a larger initiative to create Live Work Hub art studios in this dilapidated area. In the 2000s, the lot hosted a popular weekend tailgate and Brown agreed to let Kierson operate on his lot on Wednesdays for lunch and on the first Friday art gallery crawl.

0:30:08.7 Ginette Wessel: In February 2012, Gaines Brown, Brian Seely, owner of the rising food truck Urban Legend, and Ted Boyd of the Charlotte City Center City Partners began collaborating to host food truck rallies on Brown’s lot every Friday night. City Center Partners helped them build a relationship with the city officials since the event violated current ordinances. Next door, a local grocery provided restrooms and sold beverages that could be brought to the rally. The trucks were scheduled and managed by the Tronner family, who operated the Sticks and Cones ice cream truck, and the rally started with just three trucks and rapidly grew from there, reaching 14 by 2015. These family and dog-friendly rallies also supported the neighboring Fat Burrito restaurant, whose manager reported that the weekly gathering had doubled their sales. After three years of popularity, in October 2015, Brown announced on Facebook that the last food truck rally at the lot would be that November. The lot, along with parcels of land on the 2.3 acre block, was being sold to make way for the Dimensional Fund Advisors investment firm headquarters.

0:31:27.2 Ginette Wessel: Brown saw this nine-story, 292 square-foot commercial office space development as crucial to supporting the amount of housing in the city and he was nearing retirement and wanted to pursue other things. And while the closing of the Food Truck Friday rallies at the lot was upsetting for many, it was not unexpected given the area’s rising property values and the walkable access to light rail and the strong housing growth in the surrounding area. Luckily, Brown, whose impact on the arts community was lasting, took steps to accommodate the rally at a local brewery.

0:32:04.2 Ginette Wessel: Sycamore Brewing, one of Charlotte’s rising brewery establishments, had a 1.6-acre property with an unused gravel area that could accommodate 12 trucks just a few blocks south of the original site. At the brewery, the trucks were successful but eventually seen as an amenity, not a focal point, for customers who primarily visited the location for the quality craft beer. Eventually, in 2021, as the South End neighborhood continued to appeal to real estate investors, the owners of Sycamore Brewing sold their property for $9 million to developer Hortman Holdings.

0:32:41.1 Ginette Wessel: The two-phase, 16-story development called The Line includes 285,000 residential square feet, 28,000 retail square feet, and the retail component of the development is anchored by a new 7,000-square-foot Sycamore Brewery and Taproom. And while the brewery moved into the new development, no plans were made to relocate the food trucks. And as South End became more vulnerable to development pressure in the neighborhood, food truck rallies were phased out. The food truck rallies had played a vital role in introducing the area to outsiders and to facilitating the community’s revitalization for 10 years and were a true public space, fostered from the bottom up by the public and local food entrepreneurs.

0:33:26.0 Ginette Wessel: So for my third vignette, I wanna step back a little bit to 2008 to explain the challenges that hindered the growth of them in Charlotte. In 2008, just before gourmet food trucks had arrived on the scene, the city revamped its food vending ordinances by enacting strict controls after residents complained about crime and noise from them along South Boulevard.

0:33:50.1 Ginette Wessel: And among the many regulations implemented, the most impactful limited them to vending only 90 days a year, limited the hours of their operation, required 400 feet of separations from residential communities or another vendor, and prohibited them entirely on the streets within the Central Business District. At the time, Loncheras, the Latino vendors that were the dominant population, saw the new regulations as a direct attack on their 50 vendor community. In an attempt to change what felt like a discriminatory act, the Loncheras launched the Carne Asada Is Not a Crime campaign and petitioned for the ordinance to be amended. Residents and city council members, on the other hand, argued the regulations were not about ethnicity and were meant to eliminate noise, garbage, and loitering. Unfortunately, the Loncheras’ advocacy efforts were too late to prevent the passage of the regulations, which had a detrimental impact on their businesses, decreasing from 50 to 7 by 2019.

0:34:52.3 Ginette Wessel: In 2014, Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Planning Department proposed the first major set of revisions since 2008. This was in response to the gourmet food truck scene, which had found the mobile food vending regulations way overly constraining. And these amendments established more zones which food trucks could operate in and were overall viewed as a step in the right direction. But vendors still felt they didn’t go far enough and were concerned that they were limited to operating one day a week, they had to remain 100 feet away from restaurants or residential districts, and they could not provide tables and chairs outside of their truck. So in response to this, vendors formed the Charlotte Food Truck Association in 2014, launched charlottefoodtrucks.org, and collected 3,000 signatures in three days. These advocacy efforts materialized in the Charlotte Mobile Food Truck Citizen Advisory Group, which were meetings held by the Planning Department.

0:35:54.5 Ginette Wessel: In March 2017, after three years of meetings, a set of amendments were approved by Charlotte City Council. Of them, some of the significant ones were allowing vendors to operate in residential districts at schools and churches, but still maintaining 100 feet from a property line, residential property line, down from that previous 400 feet, allowing them to operate near a restaurant if they had permission from the owner, written permission, otherwise they needed to stay 50 feet away. Vendors were no longer constrained to certain hours of operation, and although the regulations still required expensive special event permits, this was largely seen as a collaboration between city officials and vendors and resulted in much less severe restrictions. And vendors felt the new regulations were really an improvement and were pleased that their voices were heard.

0:36:52.1 Ginette Wessel: So though Loncheras were unable to change policy in 2008, and food truck vendors were able to achieve this middle-of-the-road agreement in the subsequent decade, it highlights the kind of ensuing challenges ethnic vendors face in the US. And for my final vignette, which I’m gonna kind of shorten ’cause I see time’s getting a little tight here, I do wanna mention that Charlotte’s residential communities were really unanticipated lifelines for sustaining profitable food truck businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, something that many vendors hadn’t predicted. Charlotte’s residents, like residents of many cities and towns in the US, were ordered to stay at home. And at that moment, food trucks across the city really started to appear in housing complexes.

0:37:47.2 Ginette Wessel: And in addition to the thrill and the novelty of ordering a meal from a truck, vendors were providing an enjoyable break from the monotony of daily life and the opportunity to connect with other people, things that were really taken for granted before the pandemic. One food truck expert had noted that neighborhood associations and apartment management companies quickly started scheduling food truck visits as a perk for their residents, and real estate businesses benefited from happy residents and residents enjoyed food options close to home. So this was a big shift for vendors who were very familiar with very predictable commercial and office areas. Now shifting into this new set of residential communities.

0:38:34.4 Ginette Wessel: And this eventually, now with the new unified development ordinance in Charlotte, is now a long-term opportunity for vendors to be vending in these large multi-unit residential complexes. There’s even data to show that the county had noted in 2021 about 250 food trucks and 70 of those had opened within the year of the pandemic. So very resilient despite that.

0:39:03.3 Ginette Wessel: I do want to pause here for another little snippet on thinking about rights. So the right to the city, as Henry Losev reminds us, always requires mobilization and struggle. Food trucks’ rights are never fixed. In this past January, I spoke with a reporter about a food truck dispute in which two Haitian Food Truck owners filed a lawsuit against their Virginia town of Park Slee after a vulgar city council member cut the truck’s water line because the owners did not have an active conditional use permit and were allegedly disposing of grease in the city’s sewer system. The lawsuit states that if the owners had not been of Haitian descent, the town government would not have engaged in abusive contact, effectively putting them out of business.

0:39:50.9 Ginette Wessel: I wanna mention that food truck vendors claiming rights to urban space is a very high risk activity that can collapse their business entirely and add to the many, many challenges of being successful. And so for this reason, actually, catering companies and brick and mortar locations become preferred by chefs and food truck owners after just a few years of operating. And while it’s unclear what the outcome will be for the Haitian food truck owners, this case is certainly a reminder that food trucks’ rights to urban space are deeply entwined with issues of cultural prejudice and protectionism of property.

0:40:29.4 Ginette Wessel: Food truck locations are also vulnerable due to the rising property values, as I’ve mentioned, and that was amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic. And as vacant land in the growing capitalist city becomes sparser and more valuable, food trucks are at risk of displacement. Additionally, and paradoxically, while food trucks are displaced, they are also part of the gentrifying process in a neighborhood. They can participate in changing a neighborhood economically by fostering food business competition or catering to populations with middle or upper incomes. And food trucks could also be promoted as amenities for new housing developments, even as they simultaneously displace homeless who occupy marginal and unseen spaces of the city. Therefore, food trucks can be gentrifiers, but not unilaterally. They are part of a wider set of relationships that force neighborhood change, and they sometimes experience the brunt of that change themselves.

0:41:32.5 Ginette Wessel: So I know we’re getting tight. So I’m gonna skip a few parts here as we get down to thinking about… I’m gonna jump down to the toolkit as I start to think about how we might approach planning for them in the future. So let me get to my slide on that one. Okay.

0:41:57.5 Ginette Wessel: So I’d like to conclude with a planner’s toolkit. Food trucks, they can support planners’ strategies to diversify and grow small businesses. And they can introduce food options to areas with very few food businesses, and they can diversify food options for customers and others. In areas with an older restaurant scene, food trucks can elevate food quality, they can provide friendly competition at lower price points. And in general, food trucks strengthen the local economy rather than weaken existing revenue streams. Food trucks can also serve as a catalyst for diversifying that economic landscape by increasing the growth of other small businesses in mobile enterprises like beauty salons, pet shops, and health services. And planning for the growth of small businesses and recognizing them as critical economic contributors within cities helps grow entrepreneurship among that middle and low income population.

0:43:00.8 Ginette Wessel: Food trucks should be considered as part of short-term and long-term urban planning strategies to activate urban space with pedestrians. They can attract patrons by social media or by proximity. They are versatile in their environment and should be considered when we think about how to distribute them with high and low income neighborhoods.

0:43:22.0 Ginette Wessel: Food truck markets create large social gatherings and more economic revenue and facilitate streamlining permits and simplifying seating and trash and other amenities. So food truck businesses also can do well independently, but both models of having independent or collective vending can be used in combination with urban activation plans. And whenever possible, they should also be supported with mobile and permanent seating shade and weather protection.

0:43:56.4 Ginette Wessel: Zoning ordinances that deregulate rather than creates constraints leave room for interpretation and flexibility when it comes to the particularities of locations. Each site’s unique and so therefore thinking about each challenge should also be unique. And so the ability to kind of think about ordinances that incorporate access to easy transportation, thinking about how public safety and fire prevention codes apply to land use zoning is also an important element that needs to be simplified. Managing these issues on a case-by-case basis appears to be the best policy that will mitigate issues and conflict. But there’s many, many other things that they can do by simplifying their permit application. They can build better communication between enforcement and the decision makers that reduces unneeded ticketing and unneeded fines. They should also think about delegating the parking enforcement to be kind of the guardians of the industry opposed to police force who are too busy to kind of manage them.

0:45:14.5 Ginette Wessel: I’d also add that data, in some of my past work, helps to support kind of an efficient form of urban planning. When you can start to see where the food trucks move over the city over time, you can pair that with land uses and food deserts and public infrastructure and property values. So thinking about how the data of social media posts can be incorporated as a planning tool is also very powerful.

0:45:42.0 Ginette Wessel: Almost done. So almost last slide here. In the end, as I recall my visits to food trucks since 2008, I realized that the industry is a microcosm of a larger set of dynamics that define everyday urban life in the 21st century. The public realm may forever be digitally mediated and amplified by our social connections. And at the time of writing, mobile enterprises are growing in value in American society. And as real estate prices continue to skyrocket. And as formal urban centers in the public realm grow fewer, the demand for informal public spaces becomes ever more obvious. So food trucks are pop-up reminders of the tremendous value in public social life in cities. Thank you, and I look forward to chatting if we have time.

0:46:34.8 Julian Agyeman: Thank you so much, Ginette. That was fascinating. And as I mentioned in my introduction, Ginette contributes to the great chapter to my book on food trucks, which is now seven years old. Go back to some of the research that we did, and we found, for instance, you know, Portland Go figure is the gastro-polis, the great food truck center, and they only have three permit requirements, whereas Boston in 2015-16 had 17 or something requirements. So of those forms of regulating trucks, I think spatial exclusion, there was behavior. And then public health. And public health. We found in Boston, the public health restrictions were huge. I mean, is this still the case? Is… Well, which of those forms of exclusion do you think is most prominent?

0:47:41.6 Ginette Wessel: It’s a good question. You know, gosh, Portland is such the anomaly in the food cart democracy because they do not require this commissary use. And I think that commissary use is a very powerful regulation coming from the county’s public health regulatory body. And so I think that is the biggest shaper of what the food trucks can or can’t do, meaning that they would have to park their trucks overnight. And in all states except Portland require that. It’s quite amazing to see this. But you see what it looks like at the end of the day if we didn’t have that particular regulation on there.

0:48:24.3 Ginette Wessel: So I think that’s one of the most powerful shapers. But I would also say the immediate reaction to them was proximity bans, as that is now over time, I think, lessened. And we’ve gotten to really look at, again, site-specific requirements opposed to blanketing the whole city with a ban to restaurants or schools, which was a very holistic approach to thinking about it. So I think we’ve backed off from that immediate reaction. And like I said, over time, the headlines to me just keep improving in terms of their acceptance. Yes, it may mean more layers of regulations in some places, but there is generally a partnership and relationship forming between cities and food trucks to what I call in San Francisco, a top up form of urbanism really where there is a strong, strong, tight-knit relationship. And that can lead to drawbacks and benefits too, certainly thinking about vendors’ autonomy is at jeopardy there. So I think I’m always fascinated. Every place has a different story that emerges from it. And it’s really a wonderful topic to explore and study.

0:49:45.9 Julian Agyeman: So we’ve got a question from our own page, Kelly, from Shareable. She says, “Any thoughts on the growth of mobile food trucks in rust belt cities and the economic benefits they could bring?” She says, “I’m in Syracuse, New York, and it feels like we’ve had a food truck boom. Local businesses like beer gardens and even our art museum have really embraced them with permanent or regular food truck days.”

0:50:11.1 Ginette Wessel: Yeah, no, I think that is absolutely the case. It is… And again, I think this is reinforcing what I just mentioned as the kind of top-up urbanism where you find city officials and event organizers really tapping into and actually looking to I would say the industry for help in understanding it better. Some of the more famous food truck advocates have become really stars for helping cities understand what to do. And that might be the case there, that they’re starting to kind of really latch into and seeing the value and the benefit that these trucks are providing in terms of economic development. There’s wonderful spillover effects that can be heard. But it comes back to kind of Julian and your work and always thinking local, right? This is another amazing illustration of how the local sustains and is resilient and continues. The COVID didn’t kill the food trucks, you know, they found a way. And so there’s just a beautiful, local approach to thinking about how we can continue to fight for rights and agency over urban space, as long as we kind of stay true to the fight.

0:51:29.5 Julian Agyeman: Right. Okay. We have another question here from Tom, Tom Llewellyn. “Are there examples of food trucks increasing access to food in neighborhoods without grocery stores and brick and mortar restaurants.” That’s a great question, Tom. I’ve never actually thought about it. So are there food trucks that are really helping out in food desert, so-called food desert areas?

0:51:56.2 Ginette Wessel: There are. And that was one of the slides I had to quickly go through. But World Central Kitchen has actually more recently been famous because they are starting to work with food trucks during disaster relief efforts, predominantly in Florida, where there’s been a lot of destruction happening. So that is becoming, more recently, the newest kind of resilience, where they’re really helping support communities in times of need after devastating natural disasters. Roy Choi, believe it or not, started a restaurant called Local, which was meant to serve low-income communities in Watts neighborhood in LA. And so he, believe it or not, the first person has really put that message forward of trying to think about how do we serve vulnerable communities in food scarcity.

0:52:50.3 Ginette Wessel: There are also education programs with schools that will take a truck for free of lunch programs in the summer for children in neighborhoods. So there is an incredible amount of efforts and it… I’m thinking too, actually. Yeah. The wildfires in California, food trucks were able to kind of go and mobilize to help collectively get a lot of food that they could distribute quickly. I know Off the Grid was very well part of that effort there in San Francisco. So there’s so many great ways I think that they are helping in filling in the void in so many dire situations of dire need or everyday stresses of communities too.

0:53:29.6 Julian Agyeman: Thanks, Ginette. So final question. You know, you’re talking here to a lot of urban planning students. If there’s one thing you can say about food trucks going into the future, that they need to be aware of as budding urban planners, what would that be?

0:53:49.0 Ginette Wessel: That’s a great question. It’s a hard one. I would say, don’t ever assume, always talk to the chefs, talk to the owner. Ethnography is an incredible tool and powerful tool for urban planning, and I think we don’t put enough attention to it. And so that would be my last piece of wisdom to leave you is, look closely and get to know your subjects that you’re looking at.

0:54:14.8 Julian Agyeman: Great. Well, Ginette, thanks so much. And you’re in Providence, I’m in Boston. Next time, let’s get a coffee in the tent.

0:54:24.3 Ginette Wessel: That’s right.

0:54:29.2 Tom Llewellyn: I hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video, transcript, and graphic recording, or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable, with support from the Barr Foundation, Shareable donors, and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graphic recording was created by Ronna Alexander. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor and communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Allison Huff, Bobby Jones and Candice Spivey. And the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share it with others. So this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.