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11/13/2017 Are Food Trucks Good or Bad for the Twin Cities? | streets.mn <br />https://streets.mn/2012/07/09/are-food-trucks-good-or-bad-for-the-twin-cities/1/14 <br />Navigation <br />Search... <br />A food truck on the U of MN campus, where good food is rare as <br />a three-toed walrus. <br />Are Food Trucks Good or Bad for the Twin Cities? <br />by Bill Lindeke on July 9, 2012 in Uncategorized <br />The Case Against Food Trucks <br />I was at an urban planning function a while <br />back when someone asked me, “What do you <br />think of food trucks?” <br />“I don’t know,” I replied. “They seem pretty <br />good to me.” <br />“They’re terrible!” he or she declared. “They <br />suck all the business from legitimate <br />restaurants. They’re ruining cities. Instead of <br />opening up an actual café, people just buy one <br />of these food trucks and park it on a corner. <br />They don’t pay any taxes. Then they make a <br />bunch of money, close up for the winter, and go down to Mexico. It’s ruining business for actual <br />restaurants in actual buildings.” <br />It made me think. Popular as they are, the case against food trucks may be somewhat legitimate. Food <br />trucks can and do park outside of actual brick and mortar joints that pay property taxes and fill our <br />empty street fronts. Lots of these cafés are running on very thin margins, struggling to make a profit in <br />our underwhelmingly people’d cities. Is it really good public policy to encourage and cultivate a bunch <br />of mobile restaurants-on-wheels when so much of our commercial real estate sits empty? Why should <br />a entrepreneur who has invested thousands in fixing up an old building, who pays much-needed <br />property taxes to the city, and who serves as a custodian of the street in a hundred invisible ways be <br />forced to compete with someone driving a CO2 spewing truck around the asphalt, tweeting like the <br />Pied Piper? Is that fair? Is that a good policy decision?