Socialist fix for Canal Street vendors: Give the criminals more room

Illegal vendors have turned Canal Street near-impassable, so City Hall’s decided . . . to give the criminals more room.

That pretty well sums up this crew’s approach to public disorder.

Canal Street, long known as an unofficial outlet mall for knock-off luxury goods like fake Gucci handbags or Rolexes, has become especially clogged with foot traffic since the Biden-era migrant boom.

Mostly African, mostly illegal, immigrants — who threaten journalists and beat up competitors — now eat up every available square inch of sidewalk space with their bedsheet displays of counterfeit (or stolen) merchandise, except for the couple of feet they allow for their customers to squeeze through.

Because the political class obsesses with protecting “the undocumented,” the city decriminalized illegal vending in March, making it a civil violation and putting enforcement under the Departments of Sanitation and Consumer and Worker Protection.

So the NYPD only gets involved if vendors ignore orders to stop blocking the sidewalk or if they violate state trademark law to the tune of a hundred grand or more.

But (surprise!) reducing law enforcement hasn’t reduced lawlessness, so Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Transportation Department is installing “super sidewalks” by narrowing Canal Street and adding painted footpaths.

They’ll actually be surprised again when the illegal vendors seize all this new frontage for their own purposes. (Who’s going to stop them?)

Illegal street vending is a menace that signals disregard for public order, winks at theft of trademarked property and degrades social trust — but the socialist cadres’ theories say otherwise.

So when this “solution” fails, expect City Hall to come up with triple down with something even more foolish, because their theories are the only thing that’s real to them.