NYC Ice Cream permits and the hidden intersection with Car Dependency

Reading this article about Mamdani cutting red tape ("Restaurants will no longer need a “superfluous” frozen dessert permit to sell ice-cream on top of the permit already required to sell food") made me think of this passage from Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar:

In part, the ice cream truck's raison d'etre was derived from restrictive zoning: neighborhoods of homes, parks, and playgrounds were often not that close to a place you could buy ice cream. Whether the truck showed up to a suburban jungle gym or a cluster of housing projects, it was always a welcome sight. But with New York City's high commercial rents, ice cream truck drivers were also taking advantage of mobile food vendor permits that went for just $100 a year.* (Strict permit caps have produced a lively black market. On the resale market, the city's limited permits are leased for #20,000 and more.)

Ice cream truck appearances are circumscribed by unwritten curbcontrol maps established by custom, negotiated by handshake, and enforced with violence. The history of ice cream truck rivalries is bloody. In 1969 armed rivals held up two Mister Softee garages in Brooklyn and the Bronx, taking nothing but the vital blender blades from thirty-nine trucks-rendering them useless before the blockbuster fourth of July weekend. (In East New York, an accomplice also kidnapped a Mister Softee driver and blew up his truck.) In 2004, a pair of Bronx seniors selling ice cream with their fifteen-year-old granddaughter were left in critical condition after a former apprentice beat them with a wrench over a route dispute. "A route is money," the couple's fourteen-year-old grandsoon cooly observed.

...

That has long been how it goes in the ice cream truck business, where the baseball bat is as important as the blender blade. In 2013, fed up with franchise fees, a Mister Softee entrepreneur named Dimitrios Tsirkos changed the names of his trucks to Master Softee. Mister sued, and won. But drivers with Tsirkos, now under the name New York Ice Cream, successfully fought their way into Midtown Manhattaan, the city's most profitable turf. "You will never see a Mister Softee truck in Midtown," a driver told a reporter. "If you do, there will be problems, and you won't see him there very long." Mister Softee vice president Jim Conway said he would love to get his drivers into the heart of Manhattan, but they were too afraid for their own safety. In 2016, a New York Ice Cream driver hit a pretzel vendor in the head with a baseball bat near the Museum of Modern Art.

The situation persisted until 2019, when the city unleashed a sting it called Operation Meltdown against seventy-six ice cream trucks, including many of New York Ice Cream's purple-and-white vehicles. Between 2009 and 2017, the city alleged, these six dozen soft-serve vehicles had amassed 22,495 unpaid parking tickets-most on just forty-six trucks--for a debt of $4.47 million, or nearly $100,000 per truck. These tickets included 846 instances of blocking crosswalks, 1,192 fire hydrant infractions, and sixty-three times blocking curb cuts. All the photos in the complaint were of New York Ice Cream trucks; 99 percent of the tickets were concentrated inthe zone New York Ice Cream had claimed as its turf. Tsirkos, the New York Ice Cream kingpin, was named as one of the six officers who "dominate and misuse the corporations they own, operate or control"--as were forty-two alleged shell companies registered at the Queens garage he co-owned, the one whose address was printed on the New York Ice Cream trucks. Those companies had names like Ice Mania Inc., Twirly Twirl Ice Ice Inc., Softee Taste Corp., and Super Softee Express Corp. Other defendants registered in Queens or the Bronx included Meathead Inc., Privilege Inc., Ice Boyz Inc., and Boyz of Midtown Inc.

Why hadn't these trucks been booted long ago? Because, the city alleged, their owners traded them for token prices, as little as $200, between scores of shell companies. One ice cream truck, which racked up $219,000 in unpaid fines between 2010 and 2017, was traded twelve times between thirteen different shell companies, adopting thirteen different license plates in the process. Each time, the truck would be transferred before the city could collect.

Operation Meltdown: https://abcnews.com/US/york-city-seizes-46-ice-cream-trucks-operation/story?id=63510442

I think most people associate Ice Cream Trucks with suburbia, I was surprised to read the densest city in the US had such an issue. Grabar points to zoning, but with the also notes how Midtown Manhattan was the most profitable area. Apart from zoning, it looked like undervaluing parking spaces and high commercial rent were the reasons to me, I didn't know NYC also had another factor in an ice cream permit that made these trucks so valuable.

TLDR: Ice Cream Trucks were (are?) very lucrative in NYC and competition over potential sales resulted in violence; selling from trucks instead of stores resulted in road violations, and needed significant police effort to stop.