Parking A Unanimous First Priority for Eden Center Merchants

the city can properly gather input from the Vietnamese businesses and patrons,” said VPC Core Organizer Binh Ly, who noted that they also filled in as interpreters. The city came equipped with handouts in Vietnamese and English, however the interpreter they contracted with was a no-show for the event.

“Kudos to the Viet Place Collective for helping bridge the city staff’s outreach efforts to the businesses and giving them a voice,” said city Vice Mayor Letty Hardi, who grew up going to Eden Center in the 1990s, and says small business ownership is part of her own family’s immigrant story. “I know first-hand the Eden Center is a special place. We have a tremendous responsibility to celebrate the culture and support the diverse businesses and livelihoods in the [East End] Small Area Plan that can be enjoyed by future genera - tions.”

Though supportive of the pop ups (a popular term these days for informal and sometimes spontaneous events) as an outreach effort to the actual businesses at Eden Center, VPC volunteers were critical of how the city has been handling outreach efforts when discussing the East End SAP. “When the city thinks of Eden Center, they just speak with the landlord’s representative.” said Ly, who added that, up until the events, the city had largely left out the business owners most vulnerable to any change in the area.

“We are trying to break this negligent pattern, and remind the city that this is a community of over 100 small businesses with specific needs.”

Posted on a permanent bulletin board installed along Eden Center’s outer walkway, six copies of notices behind its glass window emphasized “Eden Center is not being sold or redeveloped,” and that “many businesses have current leases that can extend beyond the year

2060!” Though the notice also continued to encourage participation in the city’s pop ups, no dates or times were given.

Organizers pointed out that the notice made no mention of the Vietnamese presence at the Center, let alone any cultural preservation — and that all six copies were in English. “The landlord rarely communicates to tenants ‘in-language,’” said Ly.

Top on VPC’s list of priorities is for the City Council to fund a full-time Vietnamese Outreach Coordinator. “We’re out with the community to make sure Vietnamese folks are being fully informed,” said Jenn Tran, Outreach Coordinator with VPC, who cited a lack of education and transparency from the city and landlord as recent cause for the rampant spreading of misinformation, including that the Eden Center would be closed as a result of the East End SAP. “We’ve been diligently building relationships with Eden business owners to understand their concerns and hopes for the future, not to make assumptions or impose the city’s idea of ‘good planning.’”

With all parties expressing the same desire — for Eden Center to remain a hub of Vietnamese culture and commerce — it may initially be difficult to understand the source of the community’s criticism without understanding the history that brought them to the parcel in the middle of Seven Corners.

Before the Vietnam War, about 15,000 Vietnamese immigrants

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