Charlotte's limits on street vending now cover the whole city. Under rules City Council passed Monday night, effective immediately, selling on streets and sidewalks outside uptown is allowed only in a city-approved vending market. There aren't any of those markets yet, and the city says it doesn't have the staff to open them.
The rules passed with one vote against, from Council Member JD Mazuera Arias. Council voted down the last part of the plan, a criminal charge for vendors caught a third time in 30 days. It would not have applied to vendors selling food. Breaking the vending rules still brings a civil fine of up to $500, not a criminal charge.
Until Monday, Charlotte's ban on unpermitted vending covered most of uptown, parts of NoDa and the districts around the stadium and the coliseum. Everywhere else, vending needed no permit. "Charlotte is truly an outlier," Deputy City Manager Shawn Heath told council. The other four of North Carolina's five largest cities, he said, regulate vending citywide.
Former Mayor Vi Lyles first asked a council committee to look at vending rules in April 2025. Heath opened his answers Monday with a joke: "I've been working on this initiative since I was a young boy."
Heath said neither the Charlotte Department of Transportation nor the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department has the staff to set up markets. The rules let the city hand that job to nonprofits, the way it does with the vendor program on Tryon Street uptown, where permitted vendors sell at designated spots at certain times of day. Charlotte Center City Partners runs that program for the city. Heath said the city pays it no administrative fee; running the program is part of the work the group already does for the city uptown.
Heath said he asked partner groups in University City, SouthPark and east Charlotte to run markets, and "the response was somewhat lukewarm from that group." They told him it was "probably not going to be our highest priority right now," he said. The exception was Center City Partners, which he said would like to run a program in South End.
Council Member Victoria Watlington said she wanted the market rules on the books anyway. "I want the underlying authority to exist for when that is available," she said.
The criminal charge
Council Member Dimple Ajmera split the criminal penalty off before the vote. Council had backed away from a criminal charge before: in April it sent an earlier version back to committee rather than make unpermitted vending a crime, and in June a council committee kept a criminal penalty alive 4-1, with Ajmera the lone no. "Many of these vendors are entrepreneurs just trying to make an honest living," she said Monday.
She asked the police whether they could track vending citations yet. A CMPD officer said a department working group was looking for a way to track civil citations, including vending tickets, and was to meet Tuesday. "Currently, we don't have that ability to collect that data," he said.
"Because we do not have that ability right now, I think considering criminal penalties based on repeat violation, it is not timely," Ajmera said. Council then voted down the criminal penalty on its own, on a motion to deny.
Council Member Reneé Johnson said she would support the rest but questioned its wording. "I just want to know where we get the word peddler from," she said. "I read peasants." Council passed the rules on the condition that "street vendors" replace "peddlers" wherever the ordinance uses it.