New Tools for Keeping Immigrant-Owned Shops in Place
Advocates Help Small Businesses Weather Changing Neighborhoods
Jenn Tran (center) leads a discussion on efforts to protect longstanding, Vietnamese-owned businesses at Eden Center (below) in Falls Church, Va. Her group, Viet Place Collective, used strategies developed by UMD researchers to impact the city's development plan.
Photos by Eman Mohammed
Jenn Tran admits that her favorite childhood memory of Eden Center, a strip of Vietnamese shops in Falls Church, Va., is controversial. Of the many snacks offered at the grocery store where she shopped each week with her mother, she always beelined to durian, the spiky fruit revered for its creamy, mango-like pulp and reviled for its stinky smell.
Finding it and other Vietnamese staples was impossible decades earlier when her parents first came to the U.S., until immigrant-owned businesses began to populate Falls Church. So when Tran saw an Instagram post in 2021 hinting at redevelopment plans for Eden Center, she and around a dozen first- and second-generation Vietnamese Americans wanted to protect the grocery and surrounding shops vital to their community.
“We were all young, English-speaking professionals, and these plans were confusing for us; and I thought, how is anyone of my parents' generation going to actually understand this?” she said. “There was no one speaking up for the Viet community.”
But strategies developed and shared by the University of Maryland’s Small Business Anti-Displacement Network (SBAN) helped their new advocacy group, the Viet Place Collective, write protections—from easing construction disruptions to providing pro-bono legal assistance—into the 161-page development plan, which was passed by the Falls Church City Council last fall.
Reading the final plan, Tran was amazed to see the city had added the language suggested by the Viet Place Collective almost word for word. “It made us realize this actually works.”
Now, SBAN has released its second Small Business Anti-Displacement Toolkit with new strategies to help small businesses owned by immigrants and people of color survive and thrive in rapidly changing neighborhoods nationwide. Available through SBAN’s website, the collection of strategies, case studies and resources offers a roadmap for navigating commercial tenant rights, property improvements, hiring and entrepreneurial support, zoning, tax credits and more.
New this year are sections on commercial property ownership and organizing strategies to help advocates and businesses like small business organizations or street vendors collaborate within neighborhoods and across cities. Case studies show the tools in action in communities across the country.
“I think part of it is just that connection and showing folks what’s possible,” said SBAN Director and urban studies and planning Associate Professor Willow Lung-Amam. “It was always our goal to ensure the toolkit reflected what folks were seeing on the ground and share examples of people doing innovative and impactful things.”
Established in 2021 with over $5 million in funding from JP.Morgan Chase & Co., SBAN has grown into a national network of over 150 members in community development, technical assistance, the nonprofit sector, economic development and small-business advocacy working to help businesses vulnerable to displacement when communities gentrify. Small businesses owned by immigrants and people of color generally have fewer resources than white-owned businesses and struggle with issues like rent spikes, construction disruption and increased competition from larger companies.
“Oftentimes, development is done for economic purposes, which means the people who have committed to a community and contributed to its identity get pushed out,” said Lung-Amam. “You will lose that character. And that’s not really how we want to build our cities.”
Beyond the toolkit, SBAN offers support through working groups, conferences, online webinars and other opportunities. Through SBAN, Tran earned a fellowship through UMD’s Urban Equity Collaborative, a new initiative funded by a UMD Grand Challenges Grant, to work on strategies for older Vietnamese business owners.
Tran and the Viet Place Collective will use the new toolkit and what Tran learned through the fellowship to work with the city over the next several years. Their hope is to ensure the protections written into the plan are implemented and to secure a “Little Saigon” designation for the neighborhood. For Tran, it’s about making community-driven change in a place meaningful to so many.
“It feels so much larger than just Eden Center, it feels like a big community win,” she said. “It’s opened my heart so much.”
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