Buildings and Commerce

Most of the buildings that you would see around Hanoi, and the rest of Vietnam, are very narrow in width. They are only about 10 ft wide, but go back fairly deep, and up quite a few stories.

Our hotel in Hanoi, Rising Dragon III, is this same dimension. Obviously, with only 10 feet in width, there are challenges with maximizing the space. The hotel has 9 stories. The first one has a small reception area, the front desk, the elevator and stairs, and then a small eating area. (Everywhere we have stayed provides a pretty good sized breakfast
for all the guests.) There are then 8 floors with rooms. The elevator and stairs divide the hotel in half, and each floor has two rooms. It is very different than the traditional American hotel.

I asked about the size of the buildings as was told by someone (I don't remember who) that it originated in the countryside, where minimizing the amount of land used was important in order to keep land available for farming. The narrow width and long depth "fit" with a rice field. Don't know if that is accurate, but it makes sense.

Not every building is a hotel, however.

In 1986, the Vietnamese government instituted a reform called Doi Moi. (Click Here to read the Wikipedia article about Doi Moi.) This step allowed some market-based economic orientation, which started in farming and grew to the cities. Suddenly, people were looking for opportunities to open businesses and begin making more money. This country is full of small business owners, and is very capitalistic for a communist country. I guess everyone is a risk-taker in Vietnam: maybe they are comfortable with business risk because the driving risk may make the risk of running a business seem so small in comparison.

What people do is use the front of the ground floor of their buildings for store fronts, and they live in the rest. Walking down the street, you see everything. Small grocery stores, liquor stores, restaurants, cafes, tea stalls, fresh vegetables, raw meats, seafood, barber shops, motorcycle repair shops, etc...

We spoke with a small business owner today. A Spanish couple who design dresses and manufacture them. (Click Here to visit the website.) I asked a lot of questions about corruption and difficulty in running a small business here. One of the things I gleaned is that small businesses fly under the radar. They don't get the same bureaucratic red tape that a larger business would have to deal with.

I suspect that most of the small businesses we saw aren't "official." This also creates a large difficulty for the government. These small businesses don't pay taxes, so a large part of the tax base in the country is ignored. Larger businesses must bear the brunt of the responsibility for generating the tax revenue...