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16 S. Cal. Interdisc. L.J. 49 (2006-2007)
Formal versus Informal Allocation of Land in a Commons: The Case of the Macarthur Park Sidewalk Vendors

handle is hein.journals/scid16 and id is 55 raw text is: FORMAL VERSUS INFORMAL ALLOCATION OF LAND IN A COMMONS: THE CASE OF THE MACARTHUR PARK SIDEWALK VENDORS GREGG W. KETTLES* ABSTRACT Sidewalk vendors are becoming a more common presence in cities in Latin America and the United States. Vendor demand for the best sidewalk vending spots increasingly exceeds supply, making necessary a system to allocate space in what is essentially an open access commons. This paper presents an empirical study of two very different systems of allocation that have been adopted in the City of Los Angeles, California, a formal one imposed by the City on legal vendors when they were unable to come up with one on their own, and a second that was embraced by illegal vendors across the street on an informal basis. The fact that illegal vendors were able to adopt any system at all, while a handful of legal vendors were unable to when given the same opportunity, is not what would have been predicted by social norms scholarship. Nor can it be attributed to the activities of local street gangs. Instead the respective success and failure of these two groups of vendors are best explained by Robert Sugden's game theory of spontaneous order. Turning to their relative merit, the illegal *Associate Professor, Mississippi College School of Law; B.A., Washington and Lee University; J.D., Yale Law School. I am indebted to a number of entities and individuals who supported this paper. Bernie Black, Greg Bowman, Bob Ellickson, Mike McCann, Mark Modak-Truran, and an anonymous reader at the First Annual Conference on Empirical Legal Studies at the University of Texas, 2006, reviewed drafts and made helpful suggestions. Participants in workshops at Mississippi College School of Law and the 2006 meeting of the Society for Latin American Studies at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom, helped me strengthen my arguments and otherwise improve the narrative. The Mississippi College School of Law supported this paper through a summer research grant. A number of individuals generously shared their time and knowledge about sidewalk vending with me. They include Alexander Bautista, Carolyn Brownwell, Maggie Calderon, Joseph Colletti, Grace Roberts Dymess, Sandra Mama Romero Plasencia, Samuel Portillo, Dina Serrano, and Angie De La Trinidad. I am also grateful to twenty-one anonymous sidewalk vendors on the east side of Alvarado Street between Sixth and Seventh Streets in Los Angeles, California. Despite their legal vulnerability, they overcame their suspicion and shared their time and their knowledge of vending with me. Paul Martin prepared the paper's map of the study area. James and Claudia Sports graciously let my family and me stay at their Los Angeles area home to enable my wife and me to perform street-level research there. While my wife and I pounded the pavement, Jim and Maxine Cain watched our children. Most of all, I thank my wife, Lorena Manriquez, who helped conceive of, conduct, and interpret interviews with Spanish speaking vendors. Errors in pulling all of this together in this paper are mine alone.

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