Reasonably affordable housing is one lure.
“The bang for your buck,” explained Gita Verma, PTA secretary at Creighton’s Corner Elementary School, who was raised in the United States and is of Indian descent. “What you can get here you just can’t get in McLean.”
So many have moved to the area that local theaters have begun showing Bollywood movies. Indian stores have proliferated.
Ashburn Spices, a narrow store bursting with tamarind candy, packets of henna, Hindi DVDs and 20 brands of basmati rice, opened in a strip mall three years ago.
“Ten years ago there was nothing here in Ashburn, and slowly I started figuring out there’s a lot of potential here for a store like that,” said owner Sunil Dahiya, a New Delhi native who lives in McLean.
Word of mouth has created a domino effect, said Pam Bhamrah, a real estate agent who has lived in Loudoun County for decades and has many South Asian clients. “A lot of homes, you’ll know they’re Indian because they’ll have some sort of decoration above the door, like little garland flowers.” And at the local pool, “you’ll see the moms and the grandmas come out and sit in saris.”
The change has been so vast that many Asians say they can hardly remember the days — just two decades ago — when there were barely 200,000 Asians in the region.
“When I first came here in the ’80s, I lived in Alexandria, and I couldn’t find an Asian grocery store,” said Song Hutchins, who founded Asian-American Homeownership Counseling in Rockville to help Asians deal with mortgages, foreclosures and the American financial system. “These days, there’s one on every corner.”
Staff writers Tara Bahrampour and David Nakamura contributed to this report.
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