---
title: New Tools for Keeping Immigrant-Owned Shops in Place
date: 2024-07-26T11:52:00-04:00
author: University of Maryland
canonical_url: "https://today.umd.edu/new-tools-for-keeping-immigrant-owned-shops-in-place"
section: Articles
---
# New Tools for Keeping Immigrant-Owned Shops in Place

*July 26, 2024* — by [Maggie Haslam](/author/maggie-haslam)


> Advocates Help Small Businesses Weather Changing Neighborhoods

*SBAN MOHAMMED 010 1920x1080 — 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.*

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.”


*Eden Center gate*




**Topics:** [Research](https://today.umd.edu/tags/research)


**Tags:** [Immigration](https://today.umd.edu/topic/immigration), [Urban Studies and Planning](https://today.umd.edu/topic/urban-studies-and-planning), [Research](https://today.umd.edu/topic/research)


**Units:** [School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation](https://today.umd.edu/topic/school-architecture-planning-and-preservation)