Houston’s Chinatown is anything but forgettable. Since Houston surpassed New York City and Los Angeles as the most diverse city in the US, Chinatown has become synonymous with not just Chinese culture and cuisine, but with an international experience. In fact, calling the area ‘Chinatown’ at all is disputed because of the diverse number of ethnic groups that live in the community according to the Houston Chronicle.
Driving down any given avenue between Beechnut and the Westpark Tollway you’ll find Indian, Pakistani, and Middle Eastern shops and markets next to Indo-Chinese (Houston has the second largest population of Indo-Chinese immigrants in the US next to Los Angeles says Houston’s Visitors Site), Vietnamese, and Thai businesses. Chinatown as Houston knows it today wasn’t always on the southwest side of town. “Old Chinatown,” near the George R. Brown Convention Center, is the original spot, though downtown expansion forced newer businesses to relocate in the 1980’s. In 1983 the first businesses of the new Chinatown opened and by the 90’s, established Asian-American entrepreneurs began moving out of the “Old Chinatown,” too.
It was a good economic move and between 2004 and 2008, property values along Bellaire Boulevard within ‘new’ Chinatown rose 25-50%. Today it is at least 6 square miles (more, depending on the district definition you ascribe to): it’s fairly spread out, with Chinese characters on street signs, and a landmark monument commissioned by the Asian American Business Council: in many ways resembles a city unto itself.
The cuisine offered here is incredibly diverse—the restaurant population is equivalent to the population density of Vatican City, and there are also almost a dozen different banks, from mainstream to overseas Chinese banks, in a less-than-one-mile stretch of Bellaire Boulevard, and the cost of living has remained relatively inexpensive compared to other Chinatowns in other cities. Houston’s Chinatown is an international melting pot that’s unique to the US in both economy and diversity.
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