Frank Jao

The legend of Frank Jao stretches from the second-to-last American transport plane out of Saigon to his status as first developer of Little Saigon, a patch of central Orange County that includes parts of five cities and accounts for the biggest concentration of ethnic Vietnamese outside of Vietnam.

The reality of Jao falls between the highlights of his legend. “Not everybody likes Frank Jao,” Dat Phan, chief executive of Nguoi Viet, the oldest and largest Vietnamese language newspaper in the U.S., once told a publication in the community’s homeland. “Profit is his bottom line. But you have to credit him. He is smart and hardworking. He played a crucial role.”

The profits come from Jao’s Huntington Beach-based Bridgecreek Group and its portfolio of multifamily and retail properties, anchored by the 150,000-square-foot Asian Garden Mall in Westminster. There are now about 4,000 commercial enterprises in Little Saigon, and Jao has accounted for around 2 million square feet of commercial development. The trail he blazed has drawn others from the ethnic community and beyond — Irvine-based R.D. Olson (see related entry) recently completed the five-story Bolsa Row Terrace with 200 apartments over 26,000 square feet of shops and dining, billed as a “gateway to the Little Saigon district.”

Yet, it hasn’t all gone well for Jao, who has been quiet on the development front since a senior housing project fell into receivership before reemerging as a 144-unit market-rate multifamily development renamed Jasmine Place.

—Jerry Sullivan