This paper interrogates how street vendors and ‘street landlords’ (street gangs), the local state and its apparatus produce quasi‐organised street‐vending landscapes in Los Angeles. It draws upon the notion of urban informality, uneven geographies of value as well as work that engages with divergent enactments of agency negotiated in relation to restrictive social structural processes. It illustrates that despite complex layers of restrictions and codes imposed by the local state, gang members and the vendors themselves , street vendors do enact agency, not as collective efforts to resist or gain state legitimacy, but as an individual ‘choice’ to work as vendors among a range of employment options to them.