Kai Wright asks if tapping into the informal economy can improve the lives of the urban poor.
Loretta Harrison is a born hustler. "I been making and selling things since I was about 8 years old," says the 45-year-old, unemployed mom. She buys wholesale in Manhattan -- balloons, socks, scarves, you name it -- then loads up a pushcart and sells at retail prices on the streets of Jamaica, Queens. She's peddled Icees off the back of a tricycle, teamed up with her teenage son to hawk bottled water for $1 at stoplights, and organized "passion parties," where she brings together groups of women to gab about sex and buy erotic toys. "I love sales," she gushes. "For me to have something that somebody else wants and for them to go in their pocket and bring out hard-earned money to get what I have is just -- it's like a high to me!"
Harrison can think of only one hustle that didn't work: selling hot dogs. Not that the fundamentals were wrong, she insists. She set up her stand in a gas-station parking lot, across from the bus stop on the large boulevard by her house. For a week, she made good money, selling dogs and buns she bought wholesale at Costco. Problem is, vending licenses of any kind are hard to come by in New York City, and the cops take violations seriously. So they ran her off after just a week. She lost $700 on a hot-dog cart she'd bought out of the classifieds. "It was gonna work," she grouses, still mad 10 years later. "If they'd left me alone, I could have been making my money."
Harrison hasn't worked a traditional, full-time job in nearly 14 years, since her eldest son, Malcolm, had a series of seizures in the second grade that resulted in brain damage. "After that, you know, he was a paranoid schizophrenic," she says. "He'd think he didn't have enough sugar in his cereal, and he'd run away and tell people we were bothering him. Punch out the windows and stuff." So she quit her job delivering mail in the neighborhood to take care of him and her then-newborn daughter. "That whole year, my Ready Teddy bags were the only thing that kept me going."
