Skidrow Live

[Magnhild Mongolo]

Ina city with a school district that has 1,300 buses, could someone ensure that all children have access to bus transportation for school? Is it possible to provide parents with day care for young children so they can work? Can there be play groups for kids living in the shelter? What about transportation to parks, after-school programs or summer classes?

Many, though not all, of the families in the neighborhood are newly arrived migrants who crossed the border and made their way to L.A., sometimes on buses paid for, they say, by various groups in San Diego, Texas and Arizona.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) recently established two new interim housing facilities at former winter shelter sites in South Los Angeles to help house families living on Skid Row. Those sites, which have a total of 18 units, are already at capacity, officials said. Other families have been housed in motels.

Beyond the city of L.A., the county has also seen an overall increase in the number of families in the homeless system in recent months. There were more than 900 additional new families in the first half of this fiscal year compared with the previous one, for a total of nearly 3,500, according to county data.

Estela Lopez, executive director of the Downtown Industrial District BID, said local businesses have been raising alarms about the number of children on Skid Row for several months. The area is an industrial one, where trucks begin arriving before dawn to the many wholesale and import/export businesses that line the streets.

Many of the resources that exist in the neighborhood were designed to serve adults who might have substance abuse problems or mental health struggles, not newly arrived migrant families with children, she said.

Para Los Nios, which was started after its founder read a 1979 Los Angeles Times article describing the lives of migrant children on Skid Row, has been asking local officials for funding to coordinate and increase services for children and families on Skid Row and will soon be preparing a proposal to design a model to help address some of the immediate needs confronting families.

The elementary and middle school already share a Wellness Center, where kids who are struggling emotionally can get help. Inside the center are cabinets filled with diapers, wipes, clothing and shoes that are regularly distributed to families.

When asked what they most need, families in the neighborhood almost uniformly respond with two things: a work permit, access to which is governed by the federal government, and an affordable place to live.

Median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, where many migrants find their first jobs working as day laborers or selling fruit on street corners, is $1,872, according to real estate firm Apartment List.

Dewey Terry, who has worked to provide assistance to people on Skid Row for years, said he has been doing his best to keep an eye out for the children living on the sidewalks since they began arriving several months ago on Towne Avenue.

The new infusion of Encampment Resolution Fund (ERF) grants from the California Interagency Council on Homelessness, part of the Business, Consumer Services and Housing Agency (BCSH), will jump-start elements of the Skid Row Action Plan by supplementing $280 million in already committed and leveraged funding from the County and City of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), and public housing authorities.

Developed by DHS Housing for Health in collaboration with stakeholders, business owners, and community members who live and work in the area, the Skid Row Action Plan was intended to comprehensively address the need for more interim and permanent housing, behavioral health, substance use treatment, and other services.

Though spanning only 4 square miles, Skid Row has 4,400 people experiencing homelessness, 2,695 of them unsheltered, according to the 2022 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count. This is the densest concentration of people experiencing homelessness in the County.

Under the fast-tracked Skid Row Action Plan, Los Angeles County, in collaboration with the City of Los Angeles and LAHSA, will immediately provide hundreds of new interim housing beds at multiple hotels and motels in and near Skid Row, as well as other locations. About 350 of those interim housing beds will include enriched services for people with the most complex health and behavioral health needs.

Over the course of three years, these interim housing beds are projected to serve about 2,500 people. An estimated 2,000 people are slated for placements into permanent housing. Meanwhile, outreach efforts are expected to help about 3,000 people.

The County will leverage its enhanced powers under the state of emergencydeclared by the Board of Supervisors earlier this year to quickly staff up outreach teams, intensive case management services, housing navigation, and more. It will also cut red tape around housing, contracting, and procurement.

The Skid Row Action Plan will also leverage $60 million in LAHSA resources, building upon a $15 million ERF grant received by LAHSA last year for the Every Woman Housed program specifically designed to end homelessness for women and families in Skid Row.

About 36% of people experiencing homelessness in Skid Row reported a serious mental illness, 33% reported substance use disorder, 25% reported physical disability, and 13% reported a developmental disability.

Attesting to the disproportionate representation of people of color among the homeless population, about 56% of people experiencing homelessness in Skid Row identify as Black/African American, while 24% identify as Hispanic/Latinx.

Skid Row contains one of the largest stable populations of homeless people in the United States, estimated at over 4,400, and has been known for its condensed homeless population since at least the 1930s.[3] Its long history of police raids, targeted city initiatives, and homelessness advocacy make it one of the most notable districts in Los Angeles.[4]

Covering fifty city blocks immediately east of downtown Los Angeles, Skid Row is bordered by Third Street to the north, Seventh Street to the south, Alameda Street to the east, and Main Street to the west.[1][5]

The term "skid row" or "skid road," referring to an area of a city where people live who are "on the skids," derives from a logging term. Loggers would transport their logs to a nearby river by sliding them down roads made from greased skids. Loggers who had accompanied the load to the bottom of the road would wait there for transportation back up the hill to the logging camp. By extension, the term began to be used for places where people with no money and nothing to do gathered, becoming the generic term in English-speaking North America for a depressed street in a city.[6]

According to the city's data, 53.1% of the population were born in California, 27.0% were born in another state, 18.8% were born in another country, and 1.1% were native residents born outside of the United States.[7]

The population was estimated to be approximately 10,580 individuals over 0.392 square miles, though there is currently no up-to-date approximation due to limited data. In 2023, the Los Angeles Longitudinal Enumeration and Demographic Survey estimated that the population increased by 13% after the COVID-19 pandemic, though no exact population estimate was provided.[8] Out of the 10,850 estimated to be in the population, 7,004 were identified as male, and 3,574 were identified as female.

The per capita income for the neighborhood in 2000 was $14,210. About 41.8% of the population were below the poverty line.[9] In 2008, the median household income for Skid Row and the surrounding areas was $15,003.[10] In 2019, the median household income for Skid Row residents was approximately $12,070, where 68.9% of the population was below the poverty line. The overall income for Skid Row continued to be below the poverty line at the time, with $67,418 being the average median household income for the Greater Los Angeles population. In 2019, the average household size was 9.9 people living in a single unit. 60.2% of the households in Skid Row were family households consisting of married-couple families with children, 25.2% were single-mother households, and 18.7% were married-couple families.

At the end of the 19th century, a number of residential hotels opened in the area as it became home to a transient population of seasonal laborers.[11][12] By the 1930s, Skid Row was home to as many as 10,000 homeless people.[13] It supported saloons, residential hotels, and social services, which drew people from the populations they served to congregate in the area.[14]

The population is probably more motley than that in a similar district of any other American city. Jews, Greeks, and Italians in the doorways of pawnshops and secondhand clothing stores vie with one another to lure the unwary passer-by inside. A fat German runs a beer parlor and just across the street a dapper Frenchman ladles up 5-cent bowls of split pea soup. A large, blond woman named Sunshine, born in Egypt, manages one of the cleaner rooming houses. A few Chinese practically monopolize the hand laundry business, and Japanese the cheapest cafes and flophouses. American Indians barter for forbidden whiskey. Chattering Mexicans loiter on the steps leading up to a second-floor hotel. Dapper Negroes, better dressed than any other vagabonds, wander by in riotous groups.

In June 1947, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) chief Clemence B. Horrall ordered what he called a "blockade raid" of the whole Skid Row area. Over 350 people were arrested. Assistant Chief Joseph Reed, who claimed that "at least 50 percent of all the crime in Los Angeles originates in the Skid Row area," stated that there had been no "strong arm robberies" on Skid Row as late as one week after the raid. Long time residents, however, were skeptical that the changes would last.[16]

In the 1950s, the area "evolved into a place where alcoholics and other people down on their luck could get a meal and a bed".[15] In 1956, the city of Los Angeles was in the midst of a program to "rehabilitate" Skid Row[17] through the clearance of decaying buildings.[18] The program was presented to property owners in the area as an economy measure. Gilbert Morris, then superintendent of building, said that at that point the provision of free social services to the approximately one square mile of Skid Row cost the city over $5 million per year as opposed to the city average of $110,000 per square mile annually.[17] The city used administrative hearings to compel the destruction of nuisance properties at the expense of the owner. By July 1960, the clearance program was said to be 87% complete in the Skid Row area.[18] With increased building codes during the 1960s, owners of residential hotels found demolition to be more cost-effective than adhering to repairs. The total number of these units is estimated to have dropped from 15,000 to 7,500 over the following decade.[19] Many residents of the area found themselves homeless with the loss of half of the affordable housing provided by hotels.[19]

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