A Time for Big Decisions in Little Saigon

As signs go, it wasn’t fancy: standard state-issue green.

But for the hundreds of Vietnamese refugees who witnessed its unveiling a decade ago, the “Little Saigon” freeway sign stood for a dream: the re-creation of a place that now exists only in their memories.

“I knew I had lost my country, but to see another Saigon created by my own people . . . I can’t describe the emotions I felt that day,” said pharmacist Danh Nhut Quach, who opened the first Vietnamese-owned business along Bolsa Avenue in Westminster.

“In every community, people try to regain what they left behind. That’s why we have a Chinatown and a Little Tokyo. That’s what Little Saigon is about.”

Ten years after its formal naming, Little Saigon has emerged as a bustling business area and the de facto capital for the largest Vietnamese emigre community in the world.

But the mile-long ribbon of Bolsa Avenue between Magnolia and Brookhurst streets has fallen short of those early dreams of a tourist attraction a la Chinatown, bogged down by a lack of planning and consensus. Short on trees and other physical embellishments, pedestrian-unfriendly Little Saigon has never extended its appeal beyond the refugees who gave birth to it.

Beyond that, its core consumers are aging; the influx of Southeast Asian refugees, which fueled its rapid economic growth, has slowed dramatically; and many of the latest arrivals are on government assistance, which has faced major cuts under U.S. welfare reform.

Mindful of the need for continued economic growth, community leaders are wrestling with how to make the area more attractive to mainstream consumers and its own, younger generation--those more inclined to patronize McDonald’s and Macy’s than Little Saigon’s mom-and-pop operations--without losing the ethnic flavor.

“If it looks too Americanized, it doesn’t attract the community,” said longtime community observer Yen Do, publisher of Nguoi Viet, the largest Vietnamese-language daily newspaper in the United States. “But if it doesn’t look modern enough, it turns away the young people.”

Most recently, the city of Westminster, which generally has stayed aloof from Little Saigon development, now is getting actively involved in helping reshape the area’s future. Several design concepts for the area are on the city’s desk.

The City Council could make a decision about who will develop the project as soon as the first week of September.

“At a minimum [the redevelopment] would improve the appearance of the area--reduce traffic and circulation and to make it a more pedestrian-friendly environment,” said Brian Fiske, planning director for the city of Westminster. “At the most, it will stimulate greater tourist interest and allow for further planning projects.”

One designer’s plans call for borrowing heavily from the colors and decorative touches of the original Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. At minimum, city planners said, such plans should include a landscaped median, trees, bilingual signs and decorative lampposts.

Postwar Immigrants Set Up 1st Shops

About 2,000 businesses are densely packed into the area. City officials say a third to a half of those are retail enterprises that generate roughly $50 million in sales annually, netting the city half a million dollars a year in sales tax revenue. The rest offer services ranging from medical care to manicures.

Little Saigon existed unofficially for years before its formal designation, after the first wave of Vietnamese refugees following the 1975 fall of Saigon set up shop in deteriorating strip malls amid bean fields and salvage yards along Bolsa Avenue. The area was attractive chiefly for its low prices.

To this day, pharmacist Quach is still unsure what caught his eye about the property--a vacant storefront that boasted nothing more appealing than a lot of parking space. But this was 1978, the rent was low, and he had just moved from Nebraska with his family, hoping to set up his own pharmacy.

“There was nothing out here,” he remembered.

Other business owners followed: a couple of grocery stores, a jewelry store, a restaurant. Their success attracted other entrepreneurs, and by 1988 Little Saigon comprised 1,000 Asian-owned businesses.

In the boom years of the early 1980s, construction seemed nonstop, and businesses were springing up regularly. Many of those enterprises folded within a few months for lack of customers or capital. But new ones sprang up to take their place.

Ten years after Quach opened that store, Gov. George Deukmejian dedicated the first freeway marker. The sense in the community was that Little Saigon was on the brink of greatness.

“We resurrected Saigon in spirit here. That’s the beauty of it,” said attorney and activist Van Thai Tran. “We were a community on the move. This area represented the hopes and ambitions of the community as a whole.”

At the heart of Little Saigon’s success is Orange County’s Vietnamese American community, now 300,000 strong.

It’s more than a business district. Little Saigon is the center of exile politics, home to a flourishing entertainment industry that produces music, videos and films, and headquarters for 13 Vietnamese-language radio stations, dozens of magazines and several daily newspapers.

“People say that if you live outside of here, you have to make a pilgrimage,” said publisher Do. “But it’s very true. We attract the intellectuals, the political activity, the commerce, the tourists.”

Lack of a ‘Grand Plan’ Hurt Retail Traffic

Westminster City Councilman Tony Lam still marvels at the transformation.

“There was no grand plan,” Lam said recently. “No one sat down and said, ‘We’re going to build a Little Saigon.’ It just happened. No one could stop people from moving in. The whole mentality was that they could be entrepreneurs.”

But that same lack of a grand plan also kept Little Saigon from attracting a more diverse base of consumers. Doctors’ offices and video stores specializing in Vietnamese-language tapes bump shoulders in bland strip malls with more tourist-attractive restaurants and gift and herbalists’ shops. With its best tourist draws thus scattered about, outsiders find little to pull them to the area.

For the most part, it remains an enclave of first-generation immigrants. That is a troubling sign, for many of those consumers are now elderly and have less spending power.

The district has suffered through other changes, from demographic to political, during the past several years.

As new economic links between the United States and Vietnam were forged in the early 1990s, lingering animosity toward the Vietnamese government engaged the emigres’ energies, rather than local community-building.

Growth during these years has been more cautious, but also more stable.

“‘I think we’ve matured greatly. The quality of growth is different, more realistic,” said developer Frank Jao, who was involved in commercial projects such as Asian Garden Mall and Asian Village--the two most prominent retail shopping centers along Bolsa.

More Businesses Chasing Fewer Dollars

Many Vietnamese Americans have moved out of the area into more affluent mainstream communities, a typical immigrant pattern. And some of the newer Vietnamese-owned businesses have opened outside Little Saigon, in such cities as Garden Grove, Fountain Valley and Huntington Beach.

When merchant David Du Tran opened his first supermarket in Westminster in 1989, he reaped the success of being the first full-sized Vietnamese grocery store in the city. But increased competition nearby prompted him to open his second store in Garden Grove and his third in Fountain Valley.

The newer stores have catered to and drawn a more varied clientele.

“When we moved to Garden Grove, we saw different customers--more Hispanics,” said Robert Phu Tran, 29, Tran’s oldest son and a vice president in the family business. At the Fountain Valley location, a brand-new, 30,000-square-foot market, “we have an American who handles customer service.”

While the first wave of refugees was moving out of Little Saigon, the more recent residents were often older veterans of the war. Many ended up on government assistance because of disabilities or age. Welfare reform has cut into many of those financial benefits.

All of those factors mean that more businesses are competing for a diminishing pool of dollars.

“We still sell most of our products to each other,” Lam said. “There are no upscale stores here. It’s still all bazaars, swap meets.”

Lam harbors dreams of Little Saigon as a tourism hub with tree-lined streets and sidewalk cafes, along the lines of New Orleans’ French Quarter or Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade.

“We’re within five miles of Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm,” he said. “We need to take advantage of that.”

But reaching consensus on the future of Little Saigon can be an elusive goal.

“Within the Little Saigon area, there are those who would very much like to leave it as it is,” said Don Anderson, Westminster’s community development director. “They’re comfortable going there. They’d be happy if nothing changed.”

Most community leaders recognize that the community must change to survive but caution that success depends on direct involvement.

“In the past, some merchants resented that the city was telling them what to do,” said Trang Nguyen, who heads Little Saigon TV. “They need to be asked to give their ideas so they feel they have a part in this.”

At least one of the design firms with plans before the city agrees.

“It’s not just a design effort but how to bring a community consensus together,” said Ki Suh Park, managing partner of Los Angeles-based Gruen Associates.

“The most important short-term project are those elements that will produce immediate visual enhancement--trees and landscaping. We will concentrate on sidewalks, parkway trees, while maintaining the traffic,” Park said.

“Another task is really suggesting ways to renovate existing storefronts. But, obviously, tenants and owners have to go along.”

One Irvine firm has plans for a more colorful undertaking.

“Trying to turn Bolsa into a pedestrian-friendly street will take planning, forethought and perhaps a little magic,” said Mark Brodeur of Urban Design Studio.

His firm would try to capture the French colonial influence of the original Saigon. “We’re going to try to replicate as much as we can--the French are famous for tree planting, median flourishes, rotaries or roundabouts.”

Bilingual signs and a color scheme similar to that in the Vietnamese city are also essential elements. “If we wanted to make it genuine, we’d have to start by asking about the furniture items. What do the street lights look like, what do the trash receptacles look like, all those details,” said Brodeur.

Some in Little Saigon see the zone’s best hope for renewed growth as coming from within the community’s own ranks. They point to a few younger Vietnamese Americans who have returned to the area to set up their own shops.

Thuy Linh Quach, 30, runs a pharmacy that is part of a small but growing sector of the economy: businesses owned or operated by the children of first-generation immigrants.

The daughter of pharmacist Danh Quach, Thuy Linh Quach feels an undeniable link to the area. Yet, educated at USC, she brings a Westernized approach to business. Her customers tend to be younger, more Americanized than typical Little Saigon shoppers and more comfortable with English than Vietnamese.

Thus Quach sees herself bridging the generational and cultural gap, and she hopes her peers--the children of immigrants--will join her.

“If we want to keep Little Saigon strong, we have to work at it,” she said.

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By The Numbers

Little Saigon is a thriving business district catering to the world’s largest Vietnamese emigre community. About 2,000 businesses dot a 2-mile stretch of Bolsa Avenue, half of them stores that total nearly $50 million in annual sales. The city of Westminster nets 1% of that amount in sales tax revenue. For numbers calculated below, Little Saigon is considered the area of Bolsa between Magnolia and Brookhurst streets.

Sales Tax Revenue

Little Saigon

1997: 462,592

Westminster

1997: 10,091,000

Little Saigon Property Taxes

1991 $470,590

1992 645,295

1993 759,700

1994 689,137

1995 717,190

1996 671,490

1997 622,323

1998 686,261

Source: City of Westminster