Earlier this week, New York senator Chuck Schumer and New York City mayor Eric Adams unveiled a new urban innovation: the “first-in-nation street deliveristas hubs.” Thanks to a $1 million federal grant, New York will convert disused sidewalk newsstands into places where food-delivery workers can charge their electric bikes and rest. This idea, at first glance, appears to fit the enlightened post-pandemic philosophy of “adaptive reuse”: since people don’t buy newspapers anymore but do get grilled-cheese sandwiches delivered to their apartments in the middle of the night, why not convert city infrastructure to serve the purpose? Adams’s idea, though, is just the start of a potentially open-ended commitment to subsidize an app-based “start-up culture” that prefers to offload its costs to the government.
New Yorkers have always had food delivered to their homes, but until the past decade or so, food delivery was anything but a tech-oriented business. You collected the menus of restaurants within a few blocks of your house, and if you weren’t interested in cooking yourself, you would call one and order a delivery. The restaurant employed someone to bring such orders via bicycle, largely in return for tips. Working as a deliveryman was certainly an honorable way for someone with few language skills or without official permission to work in this country to make an off-the-books living, though it was always rife with underpayment, exploitation, and some danger. Nobody really saw it as a growth industry or a major locus of employment.
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