A blood-soaked towel in the middle of the sidewalk. Dried splatters of crimson red in the biting winter air, the once-white cloth sits beneath the hum of passing cars and trucks on the overarching highway above — a formidable concrete slab dividing Little Saigon from the rest of the Chinatown International District (CID). Staring out into the distance toward the intersection of 12th and Jackson, mobs of open-air drug-use had seemingly disappeared. Walking in, I’d caught glimpses of blackened aluminum scraps left behind. Nothing’s changed, I thought to myself.
Last November, I stood where hundreds of homeless had once occupied the length of an extended block. As I’ve written previously, the air in this spot was once so thick with fentanyl, so crowded with the addicted, that the open road was the best sidewalk. Following a string of violent stabbings a few weeks earlier, all that remained were torn shreds of cloth draped over the top of a coiled spring of barbed wire. A police cruiser, making its second tour around the block, illuminated the wet pavement with a neon reflection.
This February, I returned to Little Saigon to check on the state of Seattle’s Stay Out of Drug Area (SODA) ordinance, now six months in action. The City’s Public Safety Committee — composed of city councilmembers Joy Hollingsworth, Cathy Moore, Sara Nelson, and led by Bob Kettle and Rob Saka, serving as Chair and Vice-Chair, respectively — voted 5-0 to push forth a formal vote across the larger council. In an 8-1 decision last September, the ordinance went into effect, establishing Little Saigon as Zone 2.
The lone dissenting vote? Former District 2 councilmember Tammy Morales, who cited the last 2o years of prior use as cause for concern.
SODA, effectively a restraining order barring two types of offenders from returning to its borders. The first, those arrested and charged with a purely drug-related offense. The second, those who have committed a non-drug related crime, determined by a judge to have “nexus” or “causal connection” between the crime committed and illegal drug activity.
I visited Little Saigon on four occasions in February.
On my first trip I ran into an outreach group serving hot food to people on the street. A block away, two King County Sheriff pickup trucks chased scrambling and stumbling homeless people outside of Lam’s Seafood into hiding behind the supermarket. On my second trip, under frigid temperatures and light snowfall, a small group of homeless were huddled, fingers extended and hovering, around a small fire behind Lam’s. On my third trip, I discovered a restaurant caught in the cycle of migrating people. Its bathrooms had fallen victim to unwanted drug-use, with heaps of leftover soiled clothes and burnt foils filling its waste bins and a sink full of soupy and crusting yellow vomit.
On my fourth trip, I visited Friends of Little Saigon (FLS) — the nonprofit fighting to preserve, to save, Little Saigon. They told me that a 20-ish person fight had broken out earlier that day.
Quynh Pham’s family came to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1990, when she was just two years old. “Now you know my age-ish,” she joked.
“I’m not good at math,” I reassured her, both of us laughing.
Pham, who grew up in Kent, Washington, would come down to Little Saigon every weekend as a kid with her family, introduced to the neighborhood by the family that sponsored her family’s path to citizenship. After graduating from the University of Washington in 2011, Pham has since spent the last 14 years serving the CID. She got her start volunteering in Chinatown, later getting her first job with the Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority (SCIDpda), before joining FLS and now working as its executive director. If anybody could give me the rundown on Little Saigon, it was her.
“The SODA zones alone, I don’t think it’s done anything,” she told me. Pham said that the city’s Downtown Activation Team (DTA), has been on scene in Little Saigon lately. The DTA, modeled after its previous iteration, the Unified Care Team, is a city group initially established last September to clean up (the city jargon would be “to activate”) the long-troubled stretch of 3rd avenue downtown.
It’s now part of an executive order signed by Mayor Harrell last November to, in a literal sense, clean up neighborhoods like Little Saigon. While watching city workers cleaning a bus stop near Little Saigon’s controversial Navigation Center, I got the feeling that the DTA was by some design, just pushing the homeless around any way they can, in all directions, just to get rid of them.
That street where the bus stop is located had no reason to be cleaned that day, washed by the actual rain, but was subject to leaf-blowing utility men and their trucks, followed closely by a police vehicle, who shifted the homeless sheltering there back down toward Lam’s so that they could “clean.”
“All of the things that are happening, it just feels overwhelming, because there’s so much happening, and these problems feel so complex. And so, what helps me is I try to dissect it down, and try to understand certain things,” Pham said, telling me she’s part of a city initiative looking at the range of problems at-hand. “One of the biggest things around is just the fentanyl, and the addiction. How do we attack that? That is the biggest one that is impacting everything else and I mean, that alone is such a big endeavor. We need our healthcare providers — public health needs to play a bigger role.”
A year ago, when I’d just started out on this path of disappointing my mother by becoming a journalist and not a doctor (her last shot at glory for bragging rights during family gatherings), the neighborhood seemed improved. This is saying a lot, given that last year I was constantly thinking to myself things can’t get worse — only for things to worsen horrendously at a dismaying speed. That version of Little Saigon seemed like a fever dream of suffering.
At that time, we were in an odd state of purgatory between the fallout of Mayor Harrell’s unspectacular, albeit ambitious, crackdown on violent crime across the city that was Operation New Day — something I now consider a standard for gauging the City’s willingness to learn from its mistakes — and a city ordinance banning public drug use that was quickly forgotten… or just outright ignored entirely.
Operation New Day, for the unfamiliar, didn’t end the inceptive market that started it all. Pham laughed when I reminded her about the illegal vendors we now want back: the old ladies.
Back in the day (am I old enough to say this?), some elderly Asian ladies ruled the mean streets outside of the Chinese Herb Shop on 12th and Jackson. You could get just about anything from them. Cabbage heads drying in the sun, open phone boxes of unknown procurement, an occasional rice cooker of known procurement, and all sorts of miscellaneous clothing items up up for sale. They’d sit on plastic stools, laying all their merchandise out on large rugs and towels; all with no license to do business. I don’t get the feeling Mayor Harrell would celebrate arresting old ladies, but he did, prematurely, for dozens of felony arrests made against these women’s black market successors that put them out of business for good post-pandemic.
When I spoke to my editor in mid- February, she got me curious about SODA as more than just a bill. Former Mayor Ed Murray proposed the zoning restraints back in 2016 for the CID — a plan calling for the Seattle Police Department (SPD), the City Attorney’s Office, and the King County Superior Court to create “as appropriate” SODA zones. It’s been almost 10 years since Mayor Murray declared a state of emergency over homelessness, and the approach to addressing the root cause of the suffering in Little Saigon is more focused on pushing them out of sight.
How different was Operation New Day from SODA?
Last year, I witnessed the same systematic sweeps block after block, day after day, week after week, month after month. The City may finally be sending teams to clean up the human feces left on sidewalks and apartment fronts, but they’ve opted for punishing the vulnerable over getting them off the streets and into housing. I see the strategy around Little Saigon, around the city at-large, as plagued by an unaddressed stagnation of ideological evolution and innovation, now bleeding deep into legislation.
All at the expense of Little Saigon.
“[The police] shouldn’t be dealing with behavioral health issues, and they don‘t need to surveil our neighborhood on a regular basis. We need service providers and other things that will help prevent crime in the long term,” said Pham.
She told me about FLS’ Phố Đẹp Initiative, a community-driven plan aimed at addressing safety concerns in the neighborhood through a spirit of shared collaboration. “So I mean, this effort is really just to kind of spin the conversation in that this neighborhood is a lot more than just the crime, and the drug activities,” she said, emphasizing the importance of assembling a coalition of Little Saigon’s stakeholders. “We need all these other investments to actually help the neighborhood come back to life.”
Pham and I spoke about everything — an interview, as often goes when I conduct them, that veered in every direction in unstructured chaos. We spoke of shared memories of eating bánh mì waiting for our parents to finish shopping, of gentrification in the neighborhood, of her father changing his name to avoid the war in Vietnam, of my lost grandfather’s supposed life as a general, of optimism despite Little Saigon’s uncertain future.
“Are things getting better? Are things getting worse? Are we getting stuck?” I ask Pham.
“I’m an optimist, so I always hope that things are getting better. I think there are a lot of different efforts on the horizon, especially as a community organizer and someone that is doing programming. I see the good impact of those things.”
After thanking Pham and her staff for their time, I exited the building. Two men stood motionless across the street, heads slumping and shoulders dropping into a still shell, only distinguishable from a corpse by the slow heave of their backs. I thought a lot about something Pham said to me in the middle of our conversation. I told her I felt as if I’d taken Little Saigon for granted in its better days.
“That’s what happens when you get older,” she told me with a smile.
