Mahatma Gandhi District, Houston

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.

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.

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,[...]"[8] Aku Patel, the owner of Karat 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.

Katharine Shilcutt of the Houston Press said that the high education and income levels of Indian Americans caused businesses in the district to thrive.

[11] In 2016 Emma Green of The Atlantic wrote that due to high levels of competition, restaurants tended to focus on employing other family members.