In other words, they are not “natives” of Da Lat.
“Most [of them] have accents from the central provinces, some also speak northern dialects,” said Quy, who has lived in Dalat for about 10 years.
“Before, there weren’t too many people in the suburbs [of Da Lat]but when I visit these places now, it is very crowded and even more greenhouses than in the city center.”
The 2021 Vietnam Provincial Governance and Public Administration Performance Index Survey showed that the central highland province of Lam Dong, of which Da Lat is the capital, ranked fourth on the list. national regions that have recently attracted the most internal migrants, after the HCMC metropolitan areas. , Hanoi and Da Nang.
Most migrants cited better environmental conditions in Lam Dong as a reason for migrating.
But there is another reason why many people settle here, as observed VnExpress journalists: business opportunities.
Tuyet Nga and her husband worked as sales executives at HCMC. They had struggled financially for 10 years before deciding to move to Da Lat and establish a host family.
“All the money we made [in HCMC] was spent to pay interest on our loans, as we borrowed money from banks to buy a house on the outskirts of town,” Nga said.
But then someone suggested that operating a homestay in Da Lat could help make a profit between 20-30 million VND per month. The couple moved to the central highland town over a year ago in an attempt to change their lives forever.
It turned out that a lot of people had the same idea as them.
“About five to six out of ten people I meet here are migrants from other places,” Nga said. “Most of the business owners here are not native to Da Lat.”
And many of these people earn their living by providing various forms of foster care, just like Nga and her husband. The result is an increase in the number of rental units in Da Lat from just 538 in 2006 to around 2,400 in 2022, more than quadrupling in 16 years.
Despite the sheer number of accommodations that Nga and her husband’s host family have to compete with, their host family is always full during each peak travel season. Their current income is better than when they were at HCMC.
“Our host family did pretty well last year,” Nga said. “Not only our accommodations, but those in Da Lat often run out of rooms during travel seasons.”
Da Lat has long been a popular travel destination in Vietnam. Some 1.32 million tourists visited Da Lat in 2016, but this figure rose to around 5.5 million 16 years later.
But this massive influx of people, both short-term tourists and new residents, also weighs on the livability of the city.
One of the most obvious consequences is the positive correlation between population and house prices.
“I know land that cost a few hundred million dong about six or seven years ago,” Quy said. “But their prices have skyrocketed to tens of billions of dong now.”
He added that houses in central Da Lat that were on sale for 3 billion VND about six to seven years ago are now being sold for 30 billion VND at the lowest.
“Prices have gone up like this in less than 10 years,” he said. “It’s hard to buy a house or land in Da Lat right now.”
Another impact is the harshness with which the growing population has hit the city’s infrastructure.
Architect Ernest Hébrard’s 1923 plan for Da Lat designed a city for between 30,000 and 50,000 people. Considering the number of people in Da Lat at that time, which stood at 1,500, the plan was quite generous.
But the number of people living in the city a century later had increased 150-fold to 240,000 – nearly five times more than the maximum capacity of the city Hébrard had in mind.
Construction expert Dr. Phan Le Binh highlighted the great challenges facing the city as the rate of urbanization has not kept up with the increase in population.
“The most fundamental consequence that everyone can see is traffic congestion,” he said, noting that there were no traffic lights in Da Lat. Now there are traffic jams almost everywhere, almost all the time.
“A densely populated place is also under pressure of high needs for schools, hospitals, grocery stores and more,” Binh added. “An increase of one inhabitant will cause new infrastructure to be added, so an increase of thousands of people will require huge changes in the city’s infrastructure system.”
The last thing Binh highlighted is the environmental impact of population growth. The increasing amounts of solid waste, waste water and polluted air are all health hazards that people can no longer escape in Da Lat.
The amount of forest cover in Da Lat has also been affected. Forest covered 69 percent of the city’s total land in 1997, but that figure only dropped to 51 percent in 2020, according to the Lam Dong agriculture and rural development department.
The area of downtown pine forests has also been halved in 21 years, from 350 hectares in 1997 to 150 hectares in 2018. This reduction is considered by many to be the main reason for recent flooding and landslides in the central upland municipality.
Architect Ngo Viet Nam Son agreed with this reasoning, saying Da Lat’s infrastructure changes have not kept pace with the city’s rate of urbanization. He warned that if the authorities do not implement any changes in urbanization planning, accidents will continue to happen in times to come.
He suggested that city authorities create outlying urban sites known as satellite towns to alleviate the problems.
“We shouldn’t order people to live in the city center anymore, because it’s already too crowded,” he said. “Creating peripheral urban sites with integrated services and businesses will encourage people to move to the outskirts of the city instead of congregating in the city center.”
Doing so successfully will also return to Da Lat the image of “a city in the forest, a forest in the city”, which was Hébard’s initial vision of the central highland city.
It is not yet guaranteed that these ideas will become reality in the future, but one thing is certain: people will continue to flock to Da Lat in search of a better life, at least in the near future. Many of Nga’s and her husband’s acquaintances have sought their advice on moving to town.
“We have a lot to worry about if we live in big metropolitan areas like Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi,” Nga said. “Like children’s school fees and many other living expenses.”
“So I’m like, why not come here? If our businesses are doing well, our lives will change forever, who knows?”
