Fountain Valley, Garden Grove and Santa Ana are tapping $550,000 in state grant funding to support and promote Little Saigon businesses and workers.
Orange County’s Little Saigon, born from the flight of refugees in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and home to the largest population of Vietnamese people outside of Vietnam, spans parts of the three cities as well as Westminster. The enclave’s more than 700 businesses generate nearly $1 billion in collective annual sales.
Now the three cities are organizing to create a Little Saigon business improvement district, with Fountain Valley councilmembers most recently approving the memorandum of understanding for the use of the state grant.
Under the memorandum, the cities will “support economic revitalization, job creation, and the cultural preservation of Vietnamese-American communities within their jurisdiction.”
Recently, Garden Grove approved a contract with consulting firm New City America, which also manages the Little Italy district in San Diego, to help form its business improvement district.
“They are the leading effort on this,” Fountain Valley Mayor Ted Bui said. “We’re all looking to this to hopefully stir some more business in the community.”
Last year, Cal State Fullerton completed an economic report on Little Saigon, providing some of the first detailed study of its demographics and economics. Including that Little Saigon has more small businesses than the county at large.
“While Little Saigon has experienced significant economic changes and challenges, we expect that it will continue to grow and have significant opportunities for small businesses and entrepreneurs,” the researchers with Cal State Fullerton’s Wood Center for Economic Analysis and Forecasting said in their report. “The Vietnamese community and Little Saigon in Orange County have consistently grown since the 1970s, and it is expected that it will continue to expand.”
Spurred and aided by the report, the cities of Fountain Valley, Santa Ana and Garden Grove sought funding for the joint business improvement venture. Westminster, where hundreds of Vietnamese American-owned businesses line Bolsa Avenue, was recently awarded its own $250,000 grant to help strengthen it’s Little Saigon area’s economy.
“Little Saigon, from my perspective, has always been built on small businesses,” said Tam Nguyen, who owns the Advance Beauty College in Garden Grove with his family and helped get the Cal State Fullerton study done. “And I think having this grant now and all the cities working with each other, I think it just shows it helps modernization.”
The partnered cities must each assign their own project managers and create a shared project committee before moving forward to the next phase of performing market research and community outreach.