I was watching a show about street food and they talked to a hot dog vendor in NYC. He started with one cart in the early 1980's after serving in the Marines in Vietnam, and said that by the late 1990's he had the most street carts in the city with almost 200.
Then Giuliani passed a law that each person could only have one permit, and he lost his entire business except for one cart. He set up by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and got harassed by the cops for his location. He kept moving his cart a few feet to technically comply with their orders and eventually they arrested him.
His vignette ended with a shot of his hot dog cart right in front of the door of the Met, and he said he was going to keep working till he was 90, and that the cops still give him a hard time.
I can't imagine a more horrible, anti-human place to live than NYC. The time and money they put into harassing a productive business owner instead of solving the millions of problems that plague that place- astounding.
I've only been there once, many years ago. Was really nice to visit, not gonna lie, but certainly not somewhere I'd want to live. And it's gotten substantially worse since then.
There's plenty of good things about NYC, it's sad that it's just so overshadowed by terrible governance. NYC could be great, just like many big cities could be. But they're usually not.