What's the History of Skid Row?

heart of downtown LA. It's just a fourth of a square mile or a single square kilometer, but an estimated eight to eleven thousand people lived there in precarious, houseless, or near houseless conditions at any given time. Some two to three thousand residents live in a tense city of tarps, blankets, and boxes. Others live in shelters and the few remaining single room occupancy hotels. The most fortunate have many apartments in new or renovated buildings built by nonprofits like these

skid Row Housing Trust. The current population of skid Row is predominantly black and male, but there are increasing numbers of women and children. Veterans make up about twenty percent of residents. LA has the highest percentage of any major metropolitan city in the United States of people experiencing chronic houselessness that is, having been unsheltered for over a year, or having experienced four such episodes in the past three years, a plus having some kind of physical or mental disability.

But how did Skidrow get this way? Why does an entire neighborhood in one of the world's wealthiest states remain walled off from the rest of the city and home to such a high concentration of people struggling with economic hardship along with coexisting issues related to, for example, mental and physical health and substance misuse. It's a long and messy story, but today let's talk a little bit about

skid Row. The first neighborhood to bear this name was in what's now Seattle, Washington, back in the eighteen fifties. Lumber was the lifeblood of colonist era Seattle. In logging camps, a skid road was the name for a path carved out of the forest on which teams of oxen would dragfeld logs over to a sawmill. In Seattle, most of the saw mills were down near the water, and logs would be slid or skidded down from first hill on steep streets lubricated with baking grease or salmon oil to

make the logs slide more easily. The area near the saw mills along the skid Road was populated by lumberjacks and mill workers, who often spent their pay at the saloons and brothels that sprung up to entertain them. This less than family oriented district also became known as skid row, and throughout the nineteen hundreds, the nickname began to be applied to any city neighborhood that housed the down and out.

For example, in New York City City in the late eighteen hundreds, the Bowery became a sort of last stop for men down on their luck. By the nineteen forties, it took on the name skid Row. Around that time. There were skid rows in dozens of American cities, but the most famous, the one that's endured in the same location for over a century, is skid Row in Los Angeles. The Transcontinental Railroad was completed in eighteen sixty nine, and

its final West coast destination was in San Francisco. In the eighteen seventies, Los Angeles convinced the railroads to extend the line down to southern California, being home to productive orchards and vineyards. The railroads needed a level surface to lay the tracks, so they chose a path along the Los Angeles River and built the first freight depots nearby. The farms drew seasonal workers to the LA area to pick and pack the crops, and more workers to load

the trains, all young single men. For the article of this episode is based on How Stuff Works. Spoke with Donald Spiweck, the former Deputy Chief of Operations and Policy at the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles and a historian of skid Row. He said all of these transitory workers needed places to live, and the area around the train stations began to fill in with

small hotels, bars, and other facilities to serve them. These would be the founding institutions of the neighborhood that would become skid Row. By the turn of the twentieth century, oil had been discovered in LA bringing even more young men out to work the oil fields and the shipping yards. Around the same time, the temperance movement was in full swing, and the first charitable missions popped up in the area. To save lost souls from the bars and brothels and

give those who needed it a place to stay. The next couple decades brought the automobile industry and then the film industry to LA, transforming what had been a sleepy hour cultural outpost into an economic boom town. The railroads advertised Los Angeles as a tropical paradise, and more Americans moved west to find their fortunes. Then came the Great Depression and the dust Bowl that ravaged Midwestern farms, spurring

even more economic migration westward. But there wasn't enough work in LA, and the hardest hit slept in train cars and encampments down by the rail yards, or rented rooms in the dilapidated single room occupancy hotels. Spivak explained that the nineteen thirties saw the beginning of a permanent underclass living in the hard luck Los Angeles community that would become skid Row. During World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam, LA was the city of departure and return

for tens of thousands of soldiers. Some of them came home with PTSD and or physical injuries that made returning home difficult. In skid Row, they found a new home, and some found that alcohol and other substances are more accessible than professional medical treatment. By the nineteen sixties, skid Row was a downtrodden and dangerous place, and its existence in the heart of Los Angeles had scared away businesses.

The city knew something needed to be done to save downtown, so it began enforcing stricter housing standards for these single resident hotels in skid Row. From the mid sixties to the mid seventies, roughly half of them were demolished in the name of urban renewal, seven five hundred units of temporary housing, but not all of them. Spidik said, Unlike most other cities that were using urban renewal to clear and demolish their skid Row neighborhoods, LA made a conscious

decision not to do that in nineteen seventy six. Instead, the public policy was that there should be a place for extremely low income persons to be able to live. The policy was humanitarian on one hand in that it preserved a place of the city for the poorest and most marginalized residents, as well as the charities and social

organizations that served them, but it wasn't entirely altruistic. It was called the containment strategy because its goal was to contain this population within the fifty blocks of skid Row and two Spivik said discourage them from wandering through the rest of downtown. By concentrating low income housing and services in skid Row, the city could attract investors to develop other parts of downtown. The official name of the skid

Row neighborhood is Central City East. It's bordered by a Little Tokyo to the north, the Fashion District to the south, the Arts District to the east, and the Historic Core to the west. Starting in the nineteen nineties, these surrounding downtown neighborhoods began to attract investment and revitalization. Industrial warehouses were renovated as lofts and live work play spaces. Old

banks and retail storefronts became boutique hotels and restaurants. As those surrounding neighborhoods gentrified, developers began to eye skid Row as the next opportunity for investment, but the city has stood firm and denied requests from developers to turn skid

Row into another gentrified neighborhood with unaffordable housing. Spivik said the city's policy is still that the city has an obligation to make sure there is a substantial amount of extra low income housing and accompanying social services in skid Row.

There are many government and independent organizations that helped serve the community in different ways, such as prevention in the form of rent relief, tenant protections, housing assistance and interim housing, mental and physical health care including harm prevention and substance recovery programs, assistance with basic resources like food, laundry and showers, help finding education and jobs to get people back on

their feet. And resources to help make the community a safe and vibrant place like recreation and pet areas, and wellness activities like yoga. It's not an easy set of tasks. The aforementioned skid Row Housing Trust shuttered in twenty twenty three among mismanagement and financial troubles. The Los Angeles Police Department hasn't always been adept. It's striking the right balance between keeping skid Row safe and making life even harder

for the people living there. For those Skidbrow residents who live on sheltered life is a daily struggle. A speedk thinks that skid Row should continue to exist into the future, but quote, it shouldn't be the only destination. Los Angeles County is four thousand square miles, that's ten thousand square kilometers. Skid Row is fifty city blocks. You can't serve the entire county wide need for housing and homeless services in a single fifty block neighborhood. There really does need to

be a decentralization of services. In twenty twenty one, the US District Court judge in Los Angeles ordered the city to immediately find housing for all houseless people in skid Row, starting with women and children, but the ruling was overturned by an appeals court. This civic said that other cities in LA County have stepped up to offer their own low income housing and other support, namely Long Beach, Glendale, Pasadena, and Santa Monica, but the other locales are still quote

very resistant. If you are interested in finding resources around LA or getting involved with helping people find them, the La County Homeless Initiative has lots of information at homeless dot La County dot gov. Today's episode is based on the article A Short History of skid Row on housetf Works dot com. Written by Dave Ruse. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how stuffboards dot com

and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.