Their most successful carts are located in surface parking lots, where a dozen or so carts will line the edge of a parking lot, creating a little restaurant row with Vietnamese, Italian, Mexican, vegetarian, pizza, Southern food, and anything else you want.

http://foodcartsportland.com/

I hope that this issue can move beyond this crazy disagreement to thinking more broadly how Baltimore can create more lunch options for downtown workers and residents and more employment opportunities for budding restauranteurs.

http://wweek.com/editorial/3419/10525/

So to make this clear – say I want to sell hot dogs out of a cart. I apply for a vendor license, get my cart inspected by the health department, apply to sell on some sort of corner somewhere, and the corner is married to the cart license until someone complains and asks me to move? What I’m really wondering here is, why aren’t the cart licenses mutually exclusive from the use of the corners? It seems to me the whole reason that the hotel is in the situation that it’s in now is because Mr. Yiannouris “owns” the corner that he’s operating on and due to his previous success opened a restaurant and didn’t operate simply because he didn’t need to. If the license is separated from the corner use – as in, you pay your dues to the city and can hold onto the license, but if you don’t use the corner within a set period of time it goes up for grabs again to another license holder. Or am I simply describing what you’re proposing? The article doesn’t exactly make it terribly clear how the whole system works. 6 months is far too short in my opinion in the event of family and financial situations – those could easily put any operator out of commission for 6 months to a year. Obviously there would need to be special circumstances to consider I would hope.

But it’s a testament to Mr. Yiannouris’ shrewd business sense that he started operating again when he did; an overpriced hotel restaurant opens in a busy section of downtown, he has the rights to sell there and he’s making a killing. Last time I checked we still operate in a capitalist society and if the restaurant is getting killed by a pit beef vendor, it’s an issue of management on the part of the restaurants. Economics 101 – if they don’t want to get killed, they have to compete. But it would seem, it’s easier for them to give someone like you a call (no offense) rather than do the hard work of actually doing business. And I realize the city needs its money and watching these restaurants flounder is difficult to watch on the tax revenue end, but shuffling a wildly successful vendor from one corner to another until he can no longer do business is not the answer. Business owners need to learn how to be business owners, not whiners. (not even going to get into how it’s more than likely prohibitively expensive on the tax end to run a restaurant downtown)

Getting back to the issue of Mr. Yiannouris squatting on the license – again, if he owns the license and pays his dues on it and someone else wants to use that corner, then they should have to BUY the rights from him. At least, that’s how it currently seems to be. But if the licenses and the right to use the corners are separate, I see no issue with saying to someone like him “ok you haven’t used this corner in a year, it’s time to put it up and let someone else (bid to) use it.” He doesn’t lose his cart license, and if he decides he wants to get back on the street, he has to go out there and find one again. Makes sense to me at least.

(as it turns out, my assumption about “owning” the corner was correct. So in that regard I agree with Bill, the corners in an used state are a drain to the city’s economy and should be put up to the market. but the permits to sell food should be owned for life so long as the dues are paid)

What I found fascinating here was that a person could squat on a license indefinitely. So long, in fact, that a hotel and restaurant could be built in the meantime.

When another ideal corner was considered as a logical compromise here, that corner was blocked by a vendor who hadn’t been there in at least six month. That is why I was considering legislation . . . . even when there seemed to be a logical solution to this problem, that corner appeared to be blocked by another non-existant vendor.

Things change and evolve. That’s good, right? In this case, that change has created a conflict . . . a conflict that should have already had a reasonable conclusion if another corner were freed up.