Little Saigon Vietnamese Neighborhood In Midtown

[MontroseNeighborhoodCafe]

Nov. 27, 2004, 11:05PM

Little Saigon tries to carry on

City pushing for ways to give area new life

By NANCY SARNOFF

Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

Lax controls over real estate development in Houston have led to the decline of some of the city's most historic and ethnically diverse neighborhoods.

City officials and business owners in Midtown want to make sure that doesn't happen to the Vietnamese enclave at the heart of the neighborhood.

The groups hope that taking small steps like posting Asian signs in the area or planting palm trees will help improve the image of this close-knit community just south of downtown.

But signs of decline are already starting to show.

While the noodle shops and tapioca bars there are usually filled with Asian families and young hipsters who live in nearby apartments and condos, other businesses are struggling to hold on.

A recent trip to an Asian grocery store on Travis revealed thinly stocked shelves and few customers.

Although little has been accomplished so far, folks from the city are pushing talks between business owners and the Midtown Management District to come up with ways to improve the area.

The city of Houston recently passed a resolution designating this part of town Little Saigon.

But giving an area a name is only the first step. Take the original Chinatown, just east of downtown.

A few improvements haven't had much impact on the area.

For example, less than a year ago the city agreed to paint the columns under U.S. 59 red to boost Chinatown's image. But those efforts did little to spur any sort of rebirth of the area. Part of the problem in Midtown is a huge exodus of Asian-owned businesses.

Once a thriving place of commerce for the Vietnamese community, many of the businesses have relocated along Bellaire Boulevard in west Houston, an area that has attracted hundreds of Asian businesses for its affordable land and lower rents.

"That was the impetus to get this thing going," said at large City Councilman Gordon Quan, who has been involved in the redevelopment efforts of Midtown.

But there are still strong traces of Vietnamese culture that could keep Midtown from facing the fate of other ethnic neighborhoods.

Holy Rosary, a Catholic church on Milam, had a big role in how the area developed, and it's still a magnet for this community.

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, the church was one of the first to take in Vietnamese priests.

The parish still holds services in Vietnamese.

[dbigtex56]

That Nancy!

Again, Ms Sarnoff, I applaud your accurate and perceptive reporting.

I've lived cheek-to-jowl with Midtown for 20 years, and have noticed that hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese businesses have been fading in this area recently. I sincerely hope that these businesspeople have found a better place in which to invest their money.

Perhaps it might be prudent to investigate where they've moved to - Bellaire Blvd.

[Subdude]

The Chronicle ran a story last year on the same topic - the gradual loss of business from "Little Saigon" as families relocated to other parts of the city. I doubt there's any effective way to stop neighborhoods from changing, or that we can reasonably expect families to live indefinitely in older ethnic enclaves.

[eLy383Inc]

Ms. Nancy:

It is inevitable that "Little Saigon" will no longer exist for its original purpose which was to cater to its predominant clients, asian immigrants. With the detrimental increasing of property taxes in the area, many business owners have had to relocate to mantain their livelihood. I believe that these efforts that the city is proposing is much too little too late. These proposals seem to me to be just for publicity sake and not for the true intention of saving " Little saigon". It does not answer any critical and immediate problems that these business owners are facing now or have been in the past five to six years of midtowns reconstruction when no one even heard of 'Midtown' in Houston. If the city really wanted to retain "Little Saigon", they could possibly develop a property tax cap or structure to eleviate some of the burden or give tax credits to business owners who have been in the area for so many years. There are many things the city can directly do to save "Little Saigon". But I do not believe that by putting up signs in Vietnamese or palms trees are truely genuine efforts to do anything. 'Give me a break.' with this said, it will be a great shame and lose to this area when "Little Saigon" no longer exist. Houston will loose another piece of its cultural signature.

[Guest danax]

I think any attempts to artificially induce a group of people to stay in a certain geographic area in order to enhance the city's image by having real,"big city" type ethnic neighborhoods is bound to fail. The Asian's are an enterprising group and those businesses will survive the old-fashioned way, by struggling to figure out a better way. A shifting of a population does not disturb me near as much as destruction of old buildings and houses, which the city has never seemed very concerned about. I say we keep the Vietnamese signs as a reminder that this was once an ethnic community, but rather than lanquish sleepy-eyed in the face of flux, they read the writing on the wall and jumped ship together.

[volvo99]

I think any attempts to artificially induce a group of people to stay in a certain geographic area in order to enhance the city's image by having real,"big city" type ethnic neighborhoods is bound to fail. The Asian's are an enterprising group and those businesses will survive the old-fashioned way, by struggling to figure out a better way. A shifting of a population does not disturb me near as much as destruction of old buildings and houses, which the city has never seemed very concerned about. I say we keep the Vietnamese signs as a reminder that this was once an ethnic community, but rather than lanquish sleepy-eyed in the face of flux, they read the writing on the wall and jumped ship together.

Correct. Besides, it wasn't like the city was collaborating with the merchants to create a "Chinatown" ethnic destination neighborhood along the likes of New York or San Francisco. Since the vietnamese are relative newcomers to the city, and have become relatively wealthy, there was not the social or economic issues of "ghettoization" that was at work in the older ethnic neighborhoods of the east coast or San Francisco.