Last Sunday late morning and afternoon, I was at Eden Center, a heavily Vietnamese shopping center in suburban Falls Church, Virginia. I was there for a meetup with a local YIMBY group—check them out!—and partly because of my writing about Eden Center, we chose this vibrant, interesting strip mall as the location.

It turns out that a lot of people, including whoever runs Eden Center’s Facebook page, had seen my article in Strong Towns praising the shopping center’s efficient use of space, local and independent businesses, and placemaking features, such as a fountain, outdoor seating, and movie nights.

Now this is not a mixed-use development—there’s no housing or office space attached or on the property—and despite its really interesting history and cultural value, the structure itself is just a typical strip plaza from the 1960s. I’ve written about it more than once because it’s such a striking example of what can be done with the suboptimal built environment we have right now to make it better, more welcoming, and more diverse.

In fact, it turns out that commercial space in Eden Center is some of the most expensive in the area. (The same is true of the heavily Indian Oak Tree Road neighborhood in New Jersey—which also inhabits an old, previously distressed suburban commercial strip.) What makes the space affordable to small business owners is that much of it is very small. Eden Center features several little indoor mall portions, crafted out of old storefronts, which are home to quite a few small vendors, restaurants, and other shops. According to the shopping center’s website, it’s home to 125 businesses (including outparcels), a number vastly greater than it was built for. Here’s the map:

As I’ve noted before, none of this is “because they’re immigrants.” What is true is that immigrant communities frequently do business in a more old-fashioned way—the way we used to before the postwar era/the suburban experiment/etc. Eden Center is not an exotic wonderland; it’s a classic Main Street economy residing in the form of a strip plaza. It isn’t something somehow off-limits to “us,” native-born, suburbanite Americans; it’s something that we choose, via bad and deliberate policy, to deny ourselves.

Now, you might be wondering, what did we do? It was a rainy afternoon. Maybe there’s a divergence between theory and practice here. Not really. We got banh mi sandwiches from a tiny deli in one of the indoor mall portions, where you approach a makeshift counter and shout your order. (One of our group members ordered a banh mi with a modification, not sure if it would get made that way, and not only was it made that way, but the owner took a dollar off because the sandwich had one less ingredient.) It’s an informal, social way of doing business, and it can make some people a little uncomfortable. It can feel like friction. Maybe it is, but I’d argue that it’s “good friction.”

Then we sat at tented tables in the parking lot, one of several outdoor seating areas. They first appeared during the dark days of the pandemic, but the tents have been driven into the asphalt in what looks like a permanent feature. That’s brave, because Eden Center’s parking was already tight (not because the lot is too small, but because the shopping center is so popular).

People came and went all day, chatting, laughing, smoking, bringing food and bubble tea and pastries from the dozens of restaurants, delis, and bakeries back to their tables. Behind us, by the bubbling fountain, people were doing karaoke. The aisles in the parking lot even have names, as though they were streets (which they are, in the sense that whale flippers are arms.) I really couldn’t believe I was sitting in a strip mall parking lot.

This is what repurposing eight parking spaces can do for a space.

Two specific modifications of the typical strip mall contribute to Eden Center’s vibrancy. One is its embrace of social spaces and activities. Sitting around here isn’t “loitering”; it’s hanging out, because the people who make Eden Center what it is see it as a community fixture, a downtown, a neighborhood. They are merely correcting suburban America’s weird, artificial divorce of commerce from socializing, and making the strip mall into a destination and a multipurpose space—despite barely changing its form.

The second modification is those tiny storefronts. It’s mundane, but it’s also transformative. If every store were 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 square feet, few entrepreneurs and local businesses could afford to locate here. Commerce at that scale inherently favors chain retail. Commerce at this scale—consider that many of these spaces in Eden Center are smaller than the lobby of a supermarket—favors small businesses. It’s a way of opening up opportunity even when commercial rents are very high.

We can learn all of this from places like Eden Center, and we can learn it from our own classic Main Streets.

But sometimes, you can put that all down and enjoy the banh mi and the bubble tea.

Related Reading:

What a Strip Mall Can Be

New Jersey’s Little India

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