
I’ve lived in downtown Los Angeles, inside the officially designated Skid Row district, for almost seven years now. That’s long enough to see the area before COVID, during it, and after—long enough to watch the cycles repeat and the public narrative harden into something flatter and less accurate than reality.
Most people think they understand Skid Row. I did too, before I moved here. What they usually mean is that they’ve seen it online—videos, photos, TikToks framed as proof that Los Angeles has failed. Skid Row has become shorthand for political arguments, a visual talking point that gets passed around without much context. But Skid Row didn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s more than a hundred years old. Many cities have their own version of it. LA’s just happens to be the one with the most cameras pointed at it right now.
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