Karen Bass green-lights Third World food-cart street sprawl

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. A cart can roll.

A lease cannot.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.Yet the sidewalk gets a different menu of rules.No permit? No problem.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 Califo...