By Tony Ngo
A blood-soaked towel laid in the middle of the sidewalk. Dried splatters of crimson red in the biting winter air, the once white cloth sat beneath the hum of passing cars and trucks on the overarching highway above— a formidable concrete slab physically 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 appeared to be gone. Catching glimpses of blackened aluminum scraps on the walk in, I thought to myself: nothing’s changed.
Last November, I stood where hundreds of homeless had once occupied the length of an extended block. As I’ve written previously, this was once where the air was so thick with fentanyl, so crowded with the addicted, that the open road was the best sidewalk. Following a string of violent stabbings— 10 in a span of less than 48 hours— 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 round around the block, illuminating the wet pavement with sirens painting neon reflection against the night sky— turning, stopping short, of where the black market had moved across the street.
This February, I returned to Little Saigon to see 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 council members: Joy Hollingsworth (District 3— representing Little Saigon), 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— effectively establishing the classification of Little Saigon as Zone 2. The lone dissenting vote? Former councilwoman Tammy Morales; citing the last 20 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; and those having committed a non-drug related crime, having been determined by a judge, to have “nexus”— the key language in the bill— or, “causal connection” between the crime committed and illegal drug activity. To satisfy the conditions to be barred from any of SODA’s two zones, one can do or sell drugs to meet the first test, or assault or commit theft under the influence of drugs.
I visited Little Saigon at length on 4 occasions in February. My first trip: running into an outreach group serving hot food for the homeless; all while, a block away, two Sheriff’s Office pickup trucks sent scrambling and stumbling homeless on the fences of Lam’s into hiding behind the supermarket. 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. My third trip: a restaurant caught in the cycle of migrating homeless— its bathrooms, having become victim to unwanted drug-use, featured heaps of leftover soiled clothes, waste bins of burnt foils, and a sink filled with a soup-thick pool of crusting yellow vomit. My fourth trip: visiting Friends of Little Saigon (FLS)— the nonprofit fighting to preserve, to save, Little Saigon— I was told a 20-something-person fight had broken out earlier.
Quynh Pham’s family came to America from Vietnam in 1990, when she was just two years old. “…Now you know my age-ish,” she’d told me.
“I’m not good at math,” I reassured her, both of us laughing. Quynh, who grew up in Kent, Washington, would come down to Little Saigon every weekend as a kid with her family— having been introduced to the neighborhood by the family that sponsored their path to citizenship. Graduating from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2011, Quynh has since spent the last fourteen 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 (SCIDPA), before joining FLS and becoming its executive director today. 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,” Quynh says to me, “but I think the changes that you’ve seen is in combination with all the other stuff that the city is doing.” Quynh told me that the city’s Downtown Activation Team (DTA), has been on scene in Little Saigon of late. The DTA, modeled after the 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.
Now part of an executive order signed last November by Mayor Bruce Harrell to, in a literal sense, clean up neighborhoods like Little Saigon. Having watched city workers “cleaning a bus stop” near Little Saigon’s Navigation Center (a local homeless center set to close), I often get the feeling that the DAT, or the City, is by some design, pushing the homeless around any way they can. Pushing them in any direction, just to get rid of them. A street that had no reason to be cleaned, even washed in rain itself, subject to leaf blowing utility men, city utility trucks, and a police car following along— shifting the homeless sheltering around the stop, back towards Lam’s.
“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,” Quynh says to me, 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. Like how do we attack that? Because that is the biggest one that is impacting everything else,” she explains, pausing for just a moment, “and I mean, that alone is such a big endeavor. We need our health care 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 (not a doctor— her last shot at glory for bragging rights during family gatherings), things were somehow better. Now, this is saying a lot, given last year was one of constantly thinking to myself things can’t get worse— only for things to in fact, worsen horrendously in such a dismaying speed, that Little Saigon itself seemed like a fever dream of suffering. Last year, we were in this odd state of purgatory; between the fallout of Mayor Harrell’s unspectacular, albeit ambitious, failing that was “Operation New Day”— something I now consider a standard of sorts 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 in entirety.
“Operation New Day”, for the unfamiliar, didn’t end the inceptive market that started it all. Quynh laughed when I reminded her about the illegal vendors we 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 (unknown procurement), an occasional rice cooker (known procurement), and all sorts of miscellaneous clothing items up for sale. They’d sat 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 the old ladies’ successor: the black markets that put them out of business for good post-pandemic.
When I spoke to my editor the second week of February, she got me curious about SODA as more than just a bill. Morales is right, as is the Central Staff’s memorandum transparent. 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 Ed Murray declared a state of emergency on homelessness, and the approach to addressing the root cause of the suffering in Little Saigon— homelessness— is more focused on pushing them out of sight.
For how different was “Operation New Day” from SODA? Last year, I’d seen the same systematic sweeps of block after block; day after day; week after week; month after month. The city may be finally 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. I see the City 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.
“So I mean, we get questions about policing all the time,” Quynh told me at the beginning of our conversation, “and it should be mainly around criminal activity and just enforcing laws. But they 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.” Quynh 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 explains, 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.”
Quynh and I spoke about everything— an interview, as often goes when I conducted them, veering 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; and of optimism despite all facing Little Saigon’s uncertain future. “Are things getting better…” I ask Quynh, “…Are things getting worse? Are we getting stuck?”
“I’m an optimist,” she tells me, “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,” she says to me, “and so if we can do more of that, I think things will turn around.” I thanked Quynh and her staff, leaving onto the backstreet where the homeless would gather behind Lam’s. Two men stood motionless across the street, heads slumping and shoulders dropping into a still shell— only distinguishable from a corpse in the slow heave of their backs.
I thought a lot about something Quynh told me in the middle of our conversation. I told her I felt as if I’d taken Little Saigon for granted in better days. “That’s what happens when you get older,” she told me with a smile.