As part of a multi-city collaboration to help revitalize Orange County’s Little Saigon, the Garden Grove City Council recently awarded a $250,000 contract to develop architectural and urban design guidelines to visually signal to visitors that they are in “a special place.”
Orange County’s Little Saigon spans parts of Westminster, Garden Grove, Fountain Valley and Santa Ana and is home to the largest concentration of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam. The enclave’s more than 700 businesses generate nearly $1 billion in collective annual sales.
Last year, the cities of Garden Grove, Fountain Valley and Santa Ana entered an agreement to create a Little Saigon business improvement district and tapped into $550,000 in state grant funding to revitalize businesses in the area. Westminster received its own $250,000 grant last September to help strengthen its Little Saigon area’s economy.
To help Little Saigon maintain its vitality, Garden Grove leaders unanimously approved the agreement that will employ the architecture, design and planning firm Gensler to draft design guidelines for the concentrations of Vietnamese businesses within the three cities to develop these areas to “support economic revitalization, job creation and cultural preservation of Vietnamese-American communities.”
“It’s really to let folks know when they’re on a property in Little Saigon that you are in a special place,” Mayor Stephanie Klopfenstein said. “To create some uniformity.”
“Unlike a zoning code where it’s ‘you shall and you shall not,’ these requirements, design guidelines, are recommendations,” she added. “So nobody will be mandated to do these things.”
As part of the agreement, Gensler must first conduct community outreach and solicit feedback from area residents and businesses before drafting any guidelines.
The cities decided to pursue the joint economic development venture last year, after a survey of Little Saigon by Cal State Fullerton provided some of the first detailed study of the area’s demographics and economics, including that it has more small businesses than the county at large.
“While Little Saigon has experienced significant economic changes and challenges,” the researchers with Cal State Fullerton’s Wood Center for Economic Analysis and Forecasting said, “we expect that it will continue to grow and have significant opportunities for small businesses and entrepreneurs.”
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