During our housing tour, it wasn’t my first time in this area of District 7. I went to the same area for shopping with my coworkers and was amazing by the development and the enormous size of the Western style mall. I felt like I was back in America, wasting time and money in the numerous sprawling shopping malls in my hometown of Los Angeles. I remember thinking how new everything in the district looked, the manmade lakes and manicured scenery was such a contrast to the gracefully old architecture of other parts of Ho Chi Minh City. The Western styled homes reflected an American suburb rather than the thriving, distinct, almost dizzying feeling of the main streets of the city. When I revisited the same location on the housing tour and learned of the displaced farmers and people that once called that land home it was a sobering moment. It still felt familiar, but in a sobering way, it reminded me of the stories my mother told of how her parents were forced to relocate to build the Los Angeles we see today. This is the narrative of development, profit before people and wealth as a unifying culture. Development groups like Sunrise City and Novaland urbanize the land but the infrastructure of the land isn’t ready for the scope of project. Flooding and inadequate city planning are just a few of the problems with the rapid expansion of Ho Chi Minh City to the surrounding farmland. Farmers are being displaced because Korean investors can afford to buy and reuse the space for malls, condominiums and high class suburban styled homes. This is an important element to the market socialist/ Communist system, the idea of common good means more profit for the government rather than homes for the people being displaced. This relationship has caused major social unrest in all of Vietnam, foreign investors have more power and a voice in what happens in the country rather than the people that have lived their all their lives. This is where the capitalism and the pursuit of profits drive the conversation, everyone else is just a passenger to the quest for economic gain.