Perishable Market

In a fashion that's so often typical of city policy making, there's an effort a foot to terminate the Moore Street Market in Brooklyn and build housing. As the NY Times' David Gonzales reports this morning: "The stalls of this Brooklyn public market on the edge of Williamsburg explode with Caribbean colors and sounds, as local shoppers buy everything from yams and peppers to maracas and mystic potions.What they can’t buy is time. After winning a one-year reprieve from their landlord — the City of New York — the market’s 13 merchants may find themselves forced out by June if the city moves forward with a plan to demolish the building and replace it with housing."

Now we've commented on this before: "The Brooklyn market goes all the way back to the LaGuardia administration but the city says that it is losing around $270,000 a year for the past four years which has the local community board manager shaking his head: "'They said that the Marqueta was 100% occupied and flourishing', said Community Board District Manager Gerald Esposito. "'So what has happened between the end of 2006 and now to cause EDC to want to close the facility, is beyond me.'" But the contradiction here goes beyond the Bloombergistas normal hostility towards small and minority businesses.

What's ironic is that La Marqueta is predominately a market for fresh produce, and is being forced out while, at the same time, the city is promoting produce peddlers in "underserved" areas just like the one where Moore Street is located. Gonzales captures this: "Moore Street is one of four surviving public markets that were built during the Depression to get pushcarts off crowded and unsanitary streets. Now, the city appears to have come full circle, wanting to close Moore Street while it promotes a new generation of pushcarts that would take fresh vegetables to poor neighborhoods. The turn of events puzzled the merchants, who prided themselves on selling so many kinds of tropical fruits and roots that they put up posters detailing all the varieties."

If, in fact, the absence of fresh produce is such a critical public health issue than why is the city working at such cross purposes here? Wouldn't it make more sense to enlarge La Marqueta and incentivize its growth as a fresh fruit and vegetable mecca?

That's not in the city's plans, in spite of the efforts of State Senator Martin Dilan: "Matthew Trapasso, the policy director for State Senator Martin Malavé Dilan, said his boss was not opposed to housing, but only wanted to make sure that the market was upgraded and the merchants allowed to return. “E.D.C. didn’t want to do that,” Mr. Trapasso recalled. “ ‘Fine,’ we said. ‘We are going to do whatever we can to make sure you don’t do anything. We’ll leave it as is and find the money to subsidize it.’ ”

It seems like such a waste; and is so indicative of the current narrowmindedness when it comes to local business. If its not something on a grand scale with billion dollar developers at the helm, it's simply beneath the contempt of the current grandees. Joan Bartolomeo of the Brooklyn EDC has the last word here: “But you can’t have houses without retail. This is a way to put into practice what we preach: preserve local business, provide local goods and keep the resources in the community.”

Market Vendors Triumph

It was an idiotic move to begin with-the EDC attempt to shut down La Marqueta in Brooklyn-and now, according to the NY Times, it appears that the vegetable vendors in the market that was established in the 1930s will be able to stay on: "The inventory at the Moore Street Retail Market is about to be restocked with the one must-have item that was fast running out: time. A year and a half after the city proposed closing this Depression-era public market on the eastern edge of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to make way for rental housing, the market’s scrappy vendors are on the verge of signing a five-year lease (with an option for five more if things go well)."

The original move made little sense since the city is trying to insure that neighborhoods such as these have good access to the very same healthy fruits and veggies that Moore Street is known for; and kudos the the electeds who stepped up to fight for these small businesses: "...the vendors scrambled to rally friends and neighbors to preserve what they saw as their tropical town square. They gathered 25,000 signatures on a petition and appealed to local politicians like Representative Nydia M. Velázquez and Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez. They are good allies to have: She is the chairwoman of the House Committee on Small Business, and he is the chairman of the State Assembly’s Committee on Housing."

So another example of the Bloombergistas attempt to shut down the little guys is defeated, and we are all counting down the time for when the lame duck quacks will be heard no more. Hats off to Virigilio Rodriguez who led the fight: “I’m happier than a dog with two tails,” said Virgilio Rodriguez, the head of the vendors’ association. “They wanted to throw us out. Now we have a place that will give us life. This is our past, our present and our future.”

Another Hispanic Marketplace Bites the Dust?

NY1 is reporting today that the city is planning to close "La Marqueta" on Moore Street in Williamsburg. The market, much like the Bronx Terminal Market, "of blessed memory," is considered to be an institution among the city's Hispanic population. As State Senator Martin Dilan told the station, We have to get them to understand that this is a cultural institution and if you have to subsidize that cultural institution then let's do it..."

The Brooklyn market goes all the way back to the LaGuardia administration but the city says that it is losing around $270,000 a year for the past four years which has the local community board manager shaking his head: "'They said that the Marqueta was 100% occupied and flourishing', said Community Board District Manager Gerald Esposito. "'So what has happened between the end of 2006 and now to cause EDC to want to close the facility, is beyond me.'"

What indeed! This is the kind of situation that needs to be seriously looked at because, as we have seen at the BTM, when this administration sets its sights on property than it will stop at nothing to get rid of existing tenants, especially if they are minority retailers.

Oh, and one more thing."EDC says that it will help relocate the 15 businesses located at the Marqueta..." The relocation of wholesaler/retailers who are "junto," will lead to their dispersion and eventual death without the synergy that they have built up. Let's hope that something can be done to help these merchants.

Council Go Carts

At today's stated City Council meeting it appears more than likely that Intro 665 will be passed in its amended form. The passage comes after council leadership was forced to significantly reduce the number of vendors as well as delimit the areas in which they will be allowed to operate. In addition, at least two vocal opponents of the bill found their police precincts exempted in exchange for their support for the green carts measure.

It is also apparent that the establishment of a review panel to evaluate the efficacy of the vendor initiative comes about as a result of the level of initial opposition that was raised: but its imperative that the panel be of a diverse make-up-with industry and labor participating in order to insure that a fair review is conducted. The Department of health, with no knowledge or concern for the food retailers, shouldn't be allowed to essentially mark its own exam.

Which brings us to the key issue of providing access to healthy foods-and the flawed manner in which the city has approached addressing it. The policy perspective must begin with the food wholesalers and their customers at the retail level-the supermarkets, green grocers and bodegas. With this in mind, it is essential that the locus of policy making be shifted from the DOH to the office of the food policy coordinator and EDC,

Improving access means improving the viability of the industry to deliver the goods in a cost-effective manner. It means examining those variables that increase the cost of doing business and looking for ways to overcome them through direct government policy changes. Primary here are the city's tax, regulatory and land use policies.

In this regard, it is important that the city create the kind of food policy task force that brings together the right kinds of expertise so that the resultant policy changes can be as effective as possible. On the small store level, the involvement of Jetro Cash-and-Carry is essential since the wholesaler supplies, and has intimate knowledge of the business challenges of all of the city's 13,000 bodegas-as well as of the vast majority of the independent restaurants that they supply from their Restaurant depot outlets. Jetro has already, unbeknownst to city policy makers, embarked on an ambitious program to entice bodegas to start shifting their business into healthier product lines.

It is also imperative that the city involve the independent supermarket owners who operate the Key Foods, C-Towns, Foodtowns Pioneers and Associated supermarkets. These are the neighborhood markets that are directly linked to those communities that have been targeted as underserved-markets that are being driven out by high rents and city tax and regulatory policies.

Finally, the city government needs to coordinate all of its housing and development efforts with an eye towards retaining and promoting supermarkets and other food stores; as part of a recognition that this is part of nurturing an essential city health service. This would mean that the effort to close the Moore Street Marqueta in Williamsburg would not go forward once it is recognized that the market is a major source of fresh produce for that underserved community.

So Intro 665 is a blip in the radar if the city actually begins to move aggressively forward on the development of a food policy initiative. The caveat here? Well, in the sixties when all of the civil disorders were cropping up it became commonplace for government to set up a commission. So common was this practice, and so ineffective, that one policy analyst actually wrote an article titled: "Let Them Eat Commissions." We need to avoid this trap and do much better.