Vietnamese businesses moving out of Midtown

Another restaurant, Pho Hoa, has already closed. A Vietnamese video store, a tailor shop and three jewelry stores have moved to new locations outside Loop 610.

Quietly, Midtown's Vietnamese community is disappearing. They built their businesses when Midtown was a forgotten stretch of redlined urban wasteland, and the immigrant owners say they are being pushed out now that the area is slated for renovation.

Although some of the Vietnamese cite demographic shifts as part of their decision to leave, others say the skyrocketing rents and chronic road construction caused by redevelopment projects are the source of their demise.

"We put in a lot of sweat building this community over 20 years," said Jimmy Hua, the owner of Hoa Binh Grocery. "But the Midtown reconstruction project is for others. It's for the big guy, not us. It forces us out."

Hua says he has searched for ways to get out of his lease and close his business. Just up the street, the competing Que Huong Supermarket has seen business fall off by half, according to assistant manager Hoa Vu. No one knows what would happen if one or both of the big grocery stores anchoring the Vietnamese business community closed.

Even those owners who plan to stay in the neighborhood just southeast of downtown say it will be a struggle to keep a Vietnamese presence there as the neighborhood is discovered by deep-pocketed developers.

"When the rent goes up, there's no place for the Oriental people," said Hai Nguyen, a Vietnamese lawyer, accountant and longtime landowner in Midtown. "They can't afford it. The whole area will be white-dominant."

It's a paradox faced by cities across the nation: As young Anglos discover the diversity of the inner city, they spawn redevelopment movements, which drive up the land values and force the minorities out.

"The irony of gentrification is that it can make areas less racially diverse," said Chester W. Hartman, an urban planner and the author of Between Eminence & Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning.

The effect of gentrification on black communities has been well-studied, both in Houston and in other parts of the nation. Many black leaders worry about the effect of redevelopment on neighborhoods like the Third and Fourth Wards, and some figures in the community see gentrification as a deliberate effort to force blacks out.

As local New Black Panther Party leader Quannel X has put it: "They call it urban renewal, but it's really Negro removal."

But while African-Americans know how to put pressure on City Hall to preserve their neighborhoods, the Vietnamese admit they are not as politically savvy and do not know how to lobby for their interests. Though most Vietnamese owners say their business is decimated by the chronic Midtown road construction, apparently none has called City Hall to register a complaint.

"The Vietnamese are a very closed community," said Charles LeBlanc, executive director of the Midtown Redevelopment Authority. "A lot of times there is a language barrier."

LeBlanc said the Vietnamese are an asset to Midtown, and he is concerned that many are relocating their businesses. But in a free-market city like Houston, he said, it's difficult to prevent the exodus.

"It's not that they're being forced out," he said. "It's because the rents go up."

While redevelopment may be pushing some Vietnamese out, other factors are pulling them away from Midtown. Those business owners who have moved to the southwest part of Houston say they are simply following their clientele.

When the Vietnamese began arriving as war refugees after 1975, many first settled in inner-city Houston, which was the only place they could afford to live. Some were placed in Allen Parkway Village, a public housing complex that has since been demolished.

Others settled in the southeast part of Houston near the Gulf Freeway -- a bit farther out, but still inside the Beltway.

Though very few lived in Midtown, the cheap land in the area made it attractive as a business and cultural center.

Vietnamese families would pour into Midtown on the weekends to do their shopping, eat lunch, attend wedding banquets or go to one of two Catholic churches with services in their language.

"Sunday was always an adventure into Midtown," recalls Hien Tran, a Vietnamese optometrist who was brought to the United States as a child and raised in Pasadena, and who now runs Eye Works, a Midtown optometry center.

Vietnamese took pride in Midtown. They worked hard to persuade the city to erect Vietnamese-language street signs, which are now a source of pride for the community.

But as the refugees began to make money over the years, many fled the inner city. Like natives, Vietnamese immigrants are attracted by the lower housing costs, larger lots, reduced crime and better schools of the suburbs, according to Nguyen.

"They have big families," he said. "They need big houses."

In this, Houston reflects the rest of the nation.

The stereotype of immigrants -- particularly Asians -- is that they live in densely packed urban neighborhoods, said Steven Camarota, a demographics expert at the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies. But in reality, immigrants increasingly live, shop and work outside the city.

"Immigrants are as likely as natives to live in the suburbs," Camarota said. "That's because the economic life of America now takes place in the suburbs. Why wouldn't immigrants take advantage of that, just like everyone else?"

Although 43 percent of immigrants live in the inner cities of the United States, 51 percent live in the suburbs, according to national census data.

As a result, cities can no longer boast of being the international centers of American life. A person is more likely to hear Urdu or find a Buddhist temple or encounter restaurants serving Salvadoran pupusas in the suburbs.

In Houston, the region of choice for Vietnamese immigrants is the southwest corridor, stretching all the way to Sugar Land. More than 40,000 Asian immigrants now live in Fort Bend County, according to the census.

As the Vietnamese began to join the Chinese who were already buying homes in southwest Houston, businesses responded. Asians set up shopping centers along Bellaire Boulevard. The largest is the Hong Kong City Mall, a giant shopping center that houses at least three businesses that used to be in Midtown.

Subtle ethnic issues divide the southwest part of town from Midtown. Some Vietnamese in Midtown say the businesses in southwest Houston are mostly owned by "Chinese," by which they mean people from mainland China and Taiwan, and even Chinese-speaking immigrants from Vietnam.

"If people come here (to Midtown), they are in Viet-town," said Nguyen. "If they go to southwest, they are in Chinatown."

Some Vietnamese restaurants -- Mai's and Van Loc, for example -- still thrive in Midtown. But the restaurants that make it have learned to make their food more palatable to a non-Vietnamese clientele.

"The businesses that cater to Americans survive," said Tran. "The ones that cater to Vietnamese don't. Vietnamese don't come into the city anymore."

And that has caused some Vietnamese to worry that Houston's Little Saigon might become as phony as New York's Little Italy, the section of the Lower East Side that used to be an Italian neighborhood but is now a place where tourists go to eat Italian food.

Nguyen hopes to save the neighborhood as something much more than a tourist destination. He has plans to transform a building he owns on Milam into a Vietnamese cultural center and library, with a Vietnamese garden on an adjacent lot. He envisions it as a place to have lectures and concerts, and poetry readings in Vietnamese.

Hai Nguyen's idea has won the support of other Vietnamese business owners in Midtown, including accountant Hoat Nguyen (no relation). While admitting that the news of late has been bleak, the business owners say their presence in Midtown -- the restaurants, the South Vietnamese flags, the marches, the street signs -- is too important to abandon.

"We've fought too hard for it," said Hoat Nguyen. "We're not going to lose it."