The Temporal and Spatial Dynamics of Law: Implementing San Francisco’s Street Vending Policy

Existing literature on street vending regulation often emphasizes the challenges in enforcing legal frameworks due to unclear laws or insufficient state capacity. However, this literature tends to overlook the diversity among vendors, how this diversity influences regulatory approaches, and how understanding these differences can provide insights into issues of legitimacy and compliance more broadly. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with vendors, community organizations, and local officials (i.e., district supervisors, public works officials, and police officers) in San Francisco, California, I trace the implementation of a street vending ordinance to examine the misalignment between legal instruments and everyday activities. Based on literature from sociolegal studies, I use a case study in the Mission District to explore through a spatiotemporal lens who legitimizes street vending and how vendors are legitimized. I find that heterogeneity of vendors influences compliance, enforcement, and the legal structure of the ordinance, shedding light on the dynamic challenges to legitimize street vendors’ use of public space. I also find that: 1) oftentimes enforcers do not know which laws exist, and 2) enforcers deploy new legal instruments, making a more intricate legal system that gives space for greater ambiguity and discretion. Most relevant, I find that during the implementation readaptation cycle, pushed by political and social reactions, previous scholarship has overlooked how laws intending to create urban order instead produce conflict and a more complex legal order that is paradoxically, more difficult to enforce.