Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll look at two groups that represent workers who spend their time on city streets, many of whom are immigrants — street vendors and delivery workers. We’ll also find out what Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate and front-runner in the race for mayor, would do about the Elizabeth Street Garden, a one-acre sliver of city-owned land in the NoLIta section of Manhattan, if he is elected.
Two groups, one representing street vendors and the other representing delivery-app workers, are joining forces to press for more protection from New York City.
The two groups say the majority of the workers they represent are immigrants. Their collaboration comes after recent raids by federal immigration agents, including one on Canal Street in Manhattan last week. The Department of Homeland Security said the agents had arrested nine men who were in the United States illegally, mostly from West Africa.
The raids have made some street vendors too scared to work, said Carina Kaufman-Gutierrez, the deputy director of one of the groups, the Street Vendor Project of the Urban Justice Center, which represents more than 2,900 sellers. She said that her group and Los Deliveristas Unidos, which represents 80,000 delivery workers, were planning a rally at City Hall this morning and were working together “to represent communities that are most vulnerable.”
“These jobs are about being in public spaces constantly,” she said. “They’re no longer safe spaces. They’ve never really been safe because of the amount of targeting. Street vendors have always been one of the overly surveilled industries and policed industries at the local level, and that’s the same with delivery workers. Yet at the same time they are essential workers who bring food where you want it when you need it — the coffee vendor at your subway station or the delivery worker who brings food to your door.”
Gabriel Montero, a spokesman for Los Deliveristas Unidos, said that the immediate focus for his group was a bill in the City Council that would prohibit app-based delivery services from deactivating workers without cause. Kaufman-Gutierrez’s group is pressing for a package of bills that would benefit street vendors, who no longer face criminal penalties under a measure that became law in July.
Justin Brannan, the City Council member who introduced the bill to prevent apps from deactivating delivery workers, called it “the final piece of an initial puzzle for workers who are mostly immigrants” and who “shouldn’t lose their income overnight because of one unfavorable review” from a customer.
“We’re trying to hold onto the moment coming out of the pandemic when people finally realized that deliveristas are essential workers,” Brannan said.
The delivery industry boomed during the pandemic and has continued to grow. The city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection reported last month that consumers spent about $134 million through delivery apps in the second quarter of 2025, from April to June — $20.6 million more than in the same three months in 2024.
The City Council passed two bills in June to improve working conditions for food delivery workers and broaden a minimum-pay standard to cover grocery app workers for companies like Instacart. Mayor Eric Adams vetoed the measures, but the Council overrode the vetoes in September.
A spokesman for Grubhub said the company had been working with Los Deliveristas Unidos and the City Council but was concerned that as written, Brannan’s bill “would require platforms to keep drivers active despite serious safety issues or services issues, and could expose sensitive customer information.”
Uber said it supported the “overall intent” of Brannan’s bill, which has support from 18 other Council members and the public advocate, Jumaane Williams.
But a spokeswoman, Freddi Goldstein, said that the measure should focus on workers who are deactivated permanently and should not cover those who are blocked from the app during slack periods when the company limits the number of deliverers who can make runs, which the company does not consider permanent deactivation. Goldstein told a City Council committee last month that Uber had permanently deactivated 2 percent of its delivery workers in 2025, “largely due to fraudulent activity and theft.”
Kassandra Perez-Desir, DoorDash’s head of government relations for New York, said in a statement that “deactivations should be rare and handled firmly” but that the current version of the bill would make it harder to hold unsafe and dangerous workers accountable. An email seeking comment from Instacart went unanswered on Tuesday.
Ligia Guallpa, the executive director of Los Deliveristas Unidos, said deliverers faced other concerns, including a new 15 m.p.h. speed limit for e-bikes that she said would “make it easier to drag workers into potential immigration enforcement” if they were ticketed by the police.
Weather
Expect a mostly cloudy day with a chance of rain. Temperatures will be in the mid-50s. It will be a rainy and breezy night with temperatures in the mid-50s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Saturday (All Saints’ Day).
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate and front-runner in the race for mayor, has weighed in on a long-running fight over whether housing should be built on city-owned land in Manhattan. The site was a vacant lot that a nonprofit turned into a green space known as the Elizabeth Street Garden in the 1990s.
Here’s the background:
For at least a decade, the city has been trying to build apartments there. Neighbors and activists in the community, including celebrities like Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese and Patti Smith, have fought it with lawsuits. Housing advocates saw the garden as a symbol of how difficult it is to try to build in wealthy areas.
The matter seemed settled earlier this year when a judge ruled in favor of the city. Mayor Eric Adams, who has presented himself as a pro-housing mayor, said he supported the planned development. An eviction of the nonprofit was scheduled for March.
In June, Adams reneged.
That may not be the end of it. Mamdani said during the taping of a podcast with the news site Hell Gate that if he was elected, he would evict the nonprofit during his first year in City Hall and restart the housing project. He had told The New York Times that the garden should be closed to build affordable housing.
My colleague Mihir Zaveri writes that Mamdani’s remarks reinforced his pro-development leanings. His principal opponent in the race for mayor, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is running as an independent, said it would be a mistake to close the garden.
METROPOLITAN diary
Still a Man
Dear Diary:
Now 6’2,” at one time even taller.
Like a tree bracing its corner of the elevator,
he extends his cane to hold the door open for her.
A gesture, gracious, effortless, done a thousand times
before at the sight of a pretty woman.
“Thank you, so that’s good for more than one thing,”
she flirts. His comeback quick: “… and it’s good
for closing my car door, too.” Once dashing, Scandinavian — broad shoulders, long legs, Marlboro-man square jaw, cleareyed. Hair
now feathery, thick ankles, halting shuffle
… a book under his left arm, another sign he is
still who he truly was, the cane leading on the right.
Important to him to let her know he is still a man
even if not quite in the game, he has a car,
he drives the car, he gets around … wants
her to know that much as they part on Eighth Avenue
— Maria Lisella
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.