Mahatma Gandhi District

The Mahatma Gandhi District (popularly known as Little India) is an ethnic enclave in Houston, Texas, United States, named after Mahatma Gandhi, consisting predominantly of Indian and Pakistani restaurants and shops and having a large Indian/Pakistani population. The area is commonly referred to as "Hillcroft," after Hillcroft Avenue, a major thoroughfare which houses much of the Mahatma Gandhi district. "Little India."

In 1983 Rupa Vyas, owner of Indian-American grocery store Jay Stores, moved the store from Rice Village to the Hillcroft area. Soon after, in 1985, the Gahunias, an Indian American family, opened Raja Sweets. Within a three-year period, India Grocers opened a location in the area. As time passed, more and more Indian American and Pakistani American businesses moved to the area. Existing Indian American businesses in the area expanded.

While being made up of Indian shops and having a large Indian population for a long time, it was not officially named until January 16, 2010 when the City of Houston held a naming ceremony. The Mayor of Houston, Annise Parker, and the Consul General of India in Houston, Sanjiv Arora, announced the name change. The Indian American community proposed marking the area as a South Asian enclave for a seven-year period until the founding of the Gandhi District. The India Culture Center and several South Asian merchants originally wanted to rename a stretch of Hillcroft Avenue to Mahatma Gandhi Avenue; however that required signatures of 75% of commercial property owners of the given part of the street. Manisha Gandhi Mehta, a spokesperson for the opening event that was held on January 16, 2010, said that the organizers of the district found difficulty in getting non-South Asian merchants to agree to the renaming of the street. In 2009 the head members of the India Culture Center and several South Asian merchants agreed to pay $10,000 for the street signage that designates the area as the district.

The district is along Hillcroft Avenue, bordered by U.S. Highway 59 (Southwest Freeway) to the south and the Westpark Tollway to the north. Katharine Shilcut of the Houston Press said that "[t]he three roads combine in such a way as to form a little triangle within the tangle of streets and strip malls,[...]" Aku Patel, the owner of 22, a jewelry store, said that continued development along Hillcroft was going to happen, but that the district would find difficulty in expanding to the other side of U.S. Highway 59 (Southwest Freeway) because a large Hispanic and Latino American population is already there. Patel said that instead the district will expand along Harwin Drive in an east-west direction.

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