Well ........i think all cities has a little saigon ....i have been to many cities in USA ....... and uk...... and they all have that bad underbelly .......i have to see them ....... because i love seeing the grit........ and danger......... and all the bad stuff .......... most people will never go to a bad hood /area ......... because they fear it ......but if you look like you know what you are doing ........ and do not care ....... as you walk ....... no one will bother you........ i did it in las vegas ........ someone told me ........ not to go to the bad area ......... near the famous pawnshop ....... store around that area ...... i did it was interesting it is bad though .....i have been to places ....... and they all have that little Saigon as the s ay .....i was in san Francisco last year ....... and that had a little saigion ...it was fucking bad with fentynol .......but great to observe .....watching people discard their live ..if they only know their self worth .....but if you want to do it ......you fucking choice to waste your life .......i have an addictive personality ...so i would not last .....all or nothing i say ........so i have to settle for nothing .......
Amid Seattle’s neglect, a Little Saigon gem somehow hangs on
In the past month, Seattle police and social worker CARE teams responded to 518 drug-related incidents across the city, according to 911 dispatch data.
These included drug dealing, buying and using drugs in public, as well as some overdoses.
One-fourth of those — 128 incidents — were in the Chinatown International District. The dispatch system lists 58 neighborhoods in the city, and so only one is bearing a quarter of the drug issues.
But even more distressing is that half of the Chinatown calls were isolated to just one block. It probably won’t floor any Seattleites to learn that the corner of 12th and Jackson, stretching south to 12th Avenue and King Street in the heart of Little Saigon, is Seattle’s drug capital.
It now has more grinding drug activity, with crowds on the sidewalks using drugs and selling stolen merchandise, than even the infamous Third Avenue and Pine Street stretch downtown.
“It’s become an embarrassment for the city,” says Tanya Nguyen.
Nguyen runs the delightful ChuMinh Tofu. It’s in that infamous derelict shopping plaza surrounded by razor wire, so you may be skeptical how “delightful” it could be. Check out some of 1,000 five-star Google reviews:
“Genuinely beautiful people serving some of the most delicious plant-based foods around!” reads one.
“This is a must visit, despite the dirty, dodgy surroundings,” reads another.
“Seattle! Please save this place, we don’t deserve it!” begs a third.
One by one the other businesses in the plaza have succumbed to the gravity of the corner.
“We’re the last one standing,” Nguyen told me, beaming.
“I feel a great affection for any of the businesses that have been able to make it here,” she added, gesturing across Jackson to a Sichuan restaurant and a few other shops.
Along a chain-link fence enclosing the mini mall was a throng of substance users and street sellers. Three King County Sheriff’s officers didn’t deter the crowd, which was so dominant on the sidewalk that passersby had to walk in the street.
Seattle police summed up what’s going on here in a recent “security survey”:
“People loitering in small groups to crowds of over 100 openly consuming illegal drugs and engaging in illegal street markets and blatant EBT fraud and trafficking on prominent intersections of the Little Saigon neighborhood,” the survey diagnosed. “This chaotic, unsafe environment is a hotspot for crime, disorder and, since 2023, a hotspot for overdose response.
“The crowd and behaviors are part of a complex and interconnected web of activities that are also connected to the place.”
That last part is troubling to people who have been fighting to save Little Saigon. What is it about this place that makes its problems so concentrated and hard to fix?
Gary Lee of the Chinatown-International District Public Safety Council said it’s the psyche of Seattle.
“We’re too lenient,” he said. “We ask the police all the time at meetings — why don’t you enforce the laws? They just roll their eyes.”
Dennis Chinn, fifth-generation owner of the Asian Plaza across the way from ChuMinh Tofu, says the disregard is purposeful. The city, he argued in a civil lawsuit last year, wants “to concentrate the problem in an immigrant minority community in order to reduce the problem in other areas of the city.”
Lee echoed that. “The city doesn’t need to respond to us because we don’t show up and complain. We don’t speak English. They can leave it all there and hide their heads.”
They have a point. What’s been happening for five years in Little Saigon wouldn’t be allowed for five hours in my part of town, Madrona.
Nguyen has been at the corner for 15 years. Before the pandemic it was hopping with commerce, the legal kind. An animal lover, she sought to carve out a 100% vegan niche in Vietnamese food. (I had the “chicken” lemon grass bahn mi — it’s really made with plant-based seitan — and it was as crispy and flavorful as any of the meat options in the city.)
She said she thought the last Seattle mayor, Bruce Harrell, would bring some calm to Little Saigon. He pledged that he would, and did for a time, surging police there in 2022. In 2024, the city opened a new park between Jackson and King and called it Hoa Mai, after a spring-blooming yellow flower.
“But the city loses interest in us,” Nguyen said. “It’s like a garden, you have to keep tending it.”
On one day this week, the new park was clustered with people smoking drugs and slumped over on the concrete walkways. A sign said the park hours were revised to close earlier, at 7:30 p.m., to “address unsafe activities.”
Nguyen said she sent the new mayor, Katie Wilson, a letter asking for help but didn’t hear back. Nguyen asked for the area to be brought under control before the World Cup in June, so that international visitors “don’t see us like this.”
“The city hasn’t done anything,” she frowned.
The dispatch data implies they are doing something. Roughly 13% of all the citywide narcotic response by police and CARE teams is going to this one area.
But it is alarming how little effect it seems to have.
Some were hoping that the new mayor would surge more social workers to the corner, for a different approach.
“We’ll take any help you can give,” Lee said. “The CARE team, outreach. Please. Send anybody.”
But, he added: “People around the city know this is where you can go now to sell your stolen stuff. So it’s going to take more than outreach.”
On Friday the City Council’s Public Safety Committee is hearing about ways to reduce crime without overly relying on cops. A community group, Friends of Little Saigon, is part of that effort. It launched a beautification program called Pho Dep and later this year is to break ground on a new cultural center in the neighborhood.
All this is fine but not enough. Tanya Nguyen is right: Without far more urgency, Seattle is on the verge of embarrassing itself on the world stage.
Nguyen should be given a “survivor’s award” — for brave persistence through years of Seattle’s paralyzed progressive neglect. Like the Google review said, we really don’t deserve the place. And one wonders if we’ll still have it for long.
