By Julia Zrihen on June 22, 2026

Note: This article was originally published by Beyond Chron.

SRO Tenant Works for Tenderloin Safety

Nguyen Thi Chau Ha, who now goes by Carol Huber-Prows, is a resident and community organizer at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic’s Garland Hotel. She told me how her father first met her: “He was dressed up as Santa at the orphanage for Christmas giving the kids presents, and I was the last one. They had us lined up in a Chu Chu train – that’s where my nickname Chu Chu comes from.”

Captain Prows’ tour in Vietnam was up, but he wasn’t ready to leave. He hadn’t received a letter back from his wife, and he needed to know her answer. He was not getting on the plane home without Chu Chu, the 18 month old Vietnamese orphan from Providence Orphanage at Can Tho, who had stolen his heart.

“And my dad fell in love with me. He would come to the orphanage just to see me.” “She has such a sweet spirit, I couldn’t forget her,” Prows told the Abilene Reporter-News when he got home.

Eventually Captain Prows got word from his wife: she said yes. He sorted out the paperwork and brought Chu Chu home in time for Easter of 1970. He strapped her into a baby seat in a B-52 to Hawaii and they continued on to Abilene, Texas, where she met her mother, brothers, and sisters.

Carol’s father was transferred to a base in Riverside, California. Carol grew up there alongside her four brothers and three sisters. She was raised Mormon, and didn’t find out she was adopted until she was 13. Until then, the only peculiarity about her existence were the days her parents kept her home from school (when the class was talking about the war).

But even before she knew the truth, she had a determination to assert her independence from the rest of her family, and a streak of mischief to go with it. The boys at school called her “ball-crusher” because of what she would do to them if they asked her on a date. Still, she was always “Daddy’s little girl;” her father would defend her no matter what she had done.

When Carol graduated from high school, she didn’t want to stay at home like the rest of her siblings. She was still angry that her parents hadn’t told her about the adoption (“Why did I have to learn from people at school, people calling me Viet-Cong, Chingaling?”). She wanted to forge her own path.

“At the end of his life my dad asked why I didn’t come home for help. I didn’t want that, Dad. I wanted to see if I could survive out here, and I did… I survived, Dad. I didn’t call home and I didn’t ask you and Mom for money.”

So Carol moved to San Francisco to be a waitress.

In the next several years, Carol was in and out of work. She married, had children, got divorced, made dear friends in the Tenderloin, struggled to stay afloat, and saw her dad – Captain Prows – die of cancer at age 55.

Carol’s fiery, don’t-mess-with-me-or-my-friends personality always made it hard for her to keep a job. The favors she’d been relying on for housing eventually ran out and she found herself in shelters with her current husband, Rob.

But in 2016, she moved into THC’s Baldwin hotel, and the permanent housing came with a new purpose:

“Everybody started coming to me with housing questions, like can we have this, can we do this, and I was like: I don’t know, let me read up on it!”

Carol began advising her fellow tenants about housing. This de facto role became official when she became a tenant organizer for the Garland Hotel.

“I set up a monthly tenant meeting where I inform my tenants what’s going on – like if we have the budget coming up and we have to fight for our funding, and we go to City Hall… and we ask them: how can we help you help us do better for our neighborhood?”

Carol and her best friend Naomi (“You can just call us double trouble”) lead a program called “Take Back the Block:” they go out on the streets, talk to people about their needs, and give them the information they need to get help. They are on the Safety Committee, which organizes to make the Tenderloin streets safer and cleaner, and the Brightline Committee, which focuses on clean air for tenants. “We say yes to everything” said Naomi.

It hasn’t all been easy. A few years ago, Carol was facing an eviction herself because of misbehavior by her dogs. She was “ready to throw in the towel,” said THC Lead Community Organizer Clifford Gilmore, preferring to be homeless again than to ask for help. But THC staff wouldn’t let her go.

“I didn’t want to talk about what was happening. But they said, ‘why not? That’s what we do. Prevent eviction. We’re here to help you, you’re one of us.”

“So I did [let them help] and that’s how I kept my housing.”

The Tenderloin is Carol’s home. She has friends who “took a harder drug” and died on the streets, and she has friends who have become SRO leaders with her. And she has friends who are still out there who she wants to help.

“I try to do good. I see people that need food. I’ll cook up some meals, like Spaghetti, I’ll go serve the whole block!…  and I want to make sure I get the education out there for people who are doing those drugs that are not cool.”

“It’s gonna take a village, it’s gonna take a lot of us to help that village. If we don’t help trying to keep it, we might as well let it go. It’s gonna disintegrate, they’re gonna change the name, they’re gonna kick the low income people out … where are we gonna go? We’re so used to being right here.”

But despite her tireless advocacy to make the Tenderloin a better place, Carol still just sees it as home:

“I see a whole different picture of the TL. I don’t see it as drug-related, or homelessness, I just see it as a community trying to come together.”