Garland is the heart of DFW's Vietnamese community, and its rent just fell 4%

The Dallas-Fort Worth area holds the fourth-largest Vietnamese community in the United States, and unlike the metro's other big Asian communities, it doesn't center on the expensive suburbs at all, it centers on two of the cheapest large cities in the region.

Garland has 15,676 Vietnamese residents, 6.4% of the city, with typical rent of $1,512 that fell 4.3% over the past year. Arlington holds 14,507 more at $1,525 a month.

Garland is the center, and it's on sale

The anchor is the Cali Saigon Mall at 3212 North Jupiter Road, opened in 2013, a Vietnamese supermarket and marketplace with a food court, live seafood, and Tet celebrations that fill the building every Lunar New Year. Hiep Thai Plaza nearby serves the same stretch, and in the Garland school district Vietnamese is the third most spoken language.

The rent situation makes the location argument for you, and it isn't subtle. Garland is the cheapest large city in this table, it holds the metro's densest Vietnamese community, and it's one of the few DFW cities where rent actually fell this year. A one-bedroom runs $1,532, and the 4.3% decline means a renter negotiating a renewal there has real leverage, which we walked through in how to negotiate rent when you have leverage.

Arlington is the second pole

Arlington's community of 14,507 is nearly Garland's size spread across a bigger city, with its own corridor of Vietnamese restaurants and groceries in the mid-cities stretch between Dallas and Fort Worth. At $1,525 it prices within thirteen dollars of Garland, though it's moving the other direction, up 3.6%, so the two won't stay this close.

Grand Prairie sits between the two poles geographically and demographically, at 3.2% Vietnamese and $1,619, and together the three cities form a triangle where most of the community's institutions sit within a short drive.

The contrast with the metro's other communities is what's striking. DFW's Korean center in Carrollton rents at $1,656 and rose 7.1%, and its Indian centers in Frisco and Irving run higher still. The Vietnamese community's home turf is the affordable corner of the map, roughly $150 to $340 a month under the metro's other cultural centers.

The four-decade history explains the geography, since the community grew from resettlement in the 1970s into the neighborhoods that were affordable then, and those neighborhoods, Garland and east Dallas especially, haven't stopped being the metro's value tier.

We've mapped the metro's other communities in the best Dallas suburbs for Korean renters and for Indian renters, and the national picture in the best cities for Vietnamese Americans.

Sources

• US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, table B02015, for Vietnamese population by city
• The Dallas Morning News, for the Cali Saigon Mall
• RentDataNow rent data by bedroom size, anchored to the Zillow Observed Rent Index, June 2026