Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Skid Row (not the band)

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

How did a large section of downtown Los Angeles become a permanent fixture of unhoused individuals? Will it always be this way? Listen in to learn all about LA's famous Skid Row.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and this is Short Stuff. Another Short Stuff. This one a bit crusady and I think important. That's right. Because if you have ever driven through downtown Los Angeles, there's a good chance you may have maybe on purpose or maybe accidentally turned into the heart of Skid Row, which is a 50-city block area, roughly, in the heart of downtown. That is something that happened to me when I lived there.

And I had heard of Skid Row, but I had never seen it. And all of a sudden, I was in the middle of it. And I was like, wow, I didn't quite know it was like this down here. Yeah. We stayed nearby, too. And I don't know if we made it all the way there, but you could tell it was very close by. And the Hotel Cecil, which was made very famous by the death of Elisa Lamb, is right there in the midst of Skid Row. And as a matter of fact, it's been turned into housing for the people who live on Skid Row. And Skid Row, we should say, finds its origin, the term, here in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is, like, there's skid rows

in just about every town, that's what they call them, but the original skid row is in Los Angeles, and it's been there essentially as long as Los Angeles has. Yeah, sort of. I mean, LA was there, but it wasn't the LA we know. Yes, but okay, so it followed so quickly on the heels of the establishment of LA that it's practically part of it forever. Well, it's definitely a part of it.

Fair enough. So what is going on in Skid Row is unhoused people are living there. As many as 10,000, 11,000, it's kind of hard to get an exact number because it fluctuates. A few thousand of those live in tent city. The rest live in shelters. Some live in SRO hotels, single room occupancy hotels. The ones who are really lucky are living in newer mini apartments that have been constructed by nonprofits.

And that is what it's going on. About 20% of them are US military veterans. Most are black males, but there are people of all stripes on Skid Row. Yeah. And like I said, it's been around a very long time, but it's under threat, actually, which you might be like, well, isn't it always under threat? No, it was actually protected for decades. We'll talk about the impending threats

and whether it's gonna go through or not, but let's talk a little bit about the original history of the thing, shall we? Yeah, and I think I see what you were saying now about Skid Row being there as long as LA's been there. Thank you. But I just don't agree, because Skid Row, Skid Row really was the 1930s

and LA started to become a thing at the turn of the century. Okay. You know what I'm saying? We're gonna hash this out one way or another over the course of this episode, I promise. So in the 1870s, LA at San Francisco was getting all the California love

with in terms of infrastructure and stuff like that, namely railroads going in there. And so LA was like, hey, what about us down here? We could use a railroad. So they said, yeah, it's a good idea. So they built that railroad down to California and where that railroad ended is what is now right in the middle of Skid Row.

Yeah, so like you said, it wasn't Skid Row yet. Fair enough, I can agree with you on that. But it has always been a bit of a rough and tumble area. For sure. So the Skid Row area that we know and love now is actually a relic of the area that grew up around those railroad yards to house and entertain the workers.

Almost entirely single young men who came to Los Angeles along with the railroad to unload rail cars, to load rail cars, to box citrus, just do all the things that you need to do around a rail yard. And some of them started hanging out around there and that's where the neighborhood that is now Skid Row finally started to develop.

That's right. And because they were young men, basically, there were, you know, bars and saloons and brothels and they had those single-resident hotels very early on. Oil came to LA and that brought even more people. The automobile industry really brought a lot more people in. The film industry brought more people in. Basically, you know, people were migrating westward in great, great numbers. And this area where that train ended just became overrun. You know, there weren't enough jobs. All of a sudden you had people sleeping in hobo encampments. You had people sleeping

on the rail yards and in the cars. And some of them, if they were lucky enough to get into one of those, you know, cruddy SRO hotels did so. But the 1930s is when, I mean, it basically became the Skid Row that we know it now, a permanent underclass living there. Yeah. And so, I mean, it was already, the downtrodden were already starting to accumulate in Skid Row, but it was not helped at all by the Depression and the Dust Bowl that pushed migration further west and made people even more destitute. So that kind of sealed the deal. Like you said from the 1930s onwards Skid Row as we understand it today was was

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck. So the Skid Row population was greatly added to during the Second World War and the Korean War because Los Angeles was a port of exit and entry back to the United States for soldiers that were shipping out. And some of them came back and were not prepared to go home. They had PTSD, they had developed drug addiction, they had developed alcoholism, and they stuck around L.A. and they just inevitably would migrate to Skid Row. That's just kind of where people have always been funneled. And as part of urban renewal in the 50s and 60s,

a lot of other cities were like, we're just gonna build a highway through Skid Row and that's how we're gonna get rid of it. In Los Angeles, the people leading the city at the time said, we're not gonna do that. We're actually going to preserve this area for the people who need it. That's right.

That was in 1976. They said, there needs to be a place for people, I think they labeled them extremely low income, but in most cases it was probably no income. And there's a couple of ways to look at this. In one way it was a more humanitarian policy than demolishing it and building a highway through it. And another way to look at it is that it was a part of a containment strategy, which is like, hey, don't leave this

50-square-block area. This is yours. It's basically like Escape from New York down there. But as long as you stay in that area, then, you know, it's sort of like the not in my backyard thing. We just, you know, stay in that area and everything will be okay. I think Escape from LA would be more appropriate, don't you, the sequel? Yeah, but that was so not good.

Was it? I've never seen it. It was strangely a garbage movie considering how great a filmmaker Carpenter was and how great Escape from New York was. Well, was it because he substituted Kurt Russell with Hilary Swank? Yeah, that was it. I was wondering what actor was going to come out of your mouth when you started that sentence. Not what I expected. So that was the 70s.

So that was pretty cool. I mean, yes, it depends on how you look at it. It was either a ruthless strategy or a humane solution. I think it's kind of both. Do we have to think in such black and white terms? Agreed. But this this area now contained meant that the other area of downtown could be refurbished and open for business because Skid Row, as you might have imagined, chased the businesses out

of downtown. But now that the people who lived in Skid Row were like, this is your spot, you have to stay here, we're going to develop around you. And the area became gentrified. But the people from Skid Row actually benefited from that, because those single room occupancy hotels that had been built over the last like 50, 60, 70 years or longer, were starting to get really down in the heels and threadbare. So they demolished some of them or they refurbished them and they did it for the residents of Skid Row. They essentially gentrified Skid Row for the residents of Skid Row in the

80s and 90s. Yeah, they tried. The Cecil Hotel, in fact, was was I think they finally finished it, but they were, I think they were refurbishing it and then it was shut down because of COVID. And I think they eventually finished it, even though the Cecil Hotel property is now up for sale. And there's, you know, there's a lot going on now. You know, is Skid Row going to look this way in ten years? Probably not. There are three big developments that are going on, one of which is those SROs that you were talking about from the 80s and 90s that they help build back up are in a lot of trouble financially and just livability goes because they're not

putting the money into it to keep them up. They were just built new and have kind of become more dilapidated over the years. The biggest of these providers, the Skid Row Housing Trust, went into a receivership last year. So, that's not a good sign of things to come. No, and there's a group called the AIDS Healthcare Foundation that is trying to take over the Skid Row Housing Trust's properties to keep them going. But apparently, their own single room occupancy building as

they're having so much trouble running it that the city actually stepped in to be like we don't approve this deal. We don't want this deal to happen. So it's not clear how this is going to happen, but there does seem to be a progress or progression toward But there does seem to be a progress or progression toward knocking down some of those buildings and building up the high rises that again are being built for the residents of Skid Row. And if that happens, they're going to be much better off than they are now because a single room occupancy hotel room is it's a room. There's a bed. There's a desk. There's room enough for you. There's no bathroom.

There's a bathroom. There's a bed, there's a desk, there's room enough for you. There's no bathroom, there's a bathroom down the hall. What they're building instead are mini apartments to where like this is your home, this is your unit. You can stay in here and you don't have to go out. If you don't want to at all, there's no shared bathroom. It's your spot. That's what they're trying to build now. And if everybody can get it together,

that's what they're gonna have, like you said, in the next 10 years. Yeah, and you know, if you've ever visited LA and you went to the sort of newly crowned downtown arts district, which is now booming with brew pubs and restaurants and wine bars and theaters and all the things that you would expect in a gentrified downtown situation. And if you're like, why this arts district is great. You may not know that the Skid Row is literally right next to you. I don't know if you saw that show on Apple TV, Platonic, with Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne. No. Friend of the show, Janet Varney is also in it, by the way.

Okay. It's the whole thing basically is, or at least Seth Rogan and his brew pub is in the arts district and a lot of the filming takes place right there. So if you've seen that show, just blocks away are 10,000 people living on the streets. So it's just something to remember when you're being a tourist in that town. Yeah. I hope to get to make it to a brew pub someday. I'll take you. We it to a brew pub someday

I'll take you. We'll have a have a nice hoppy IPA. That sounds great. I wonder if they'll have one I don't know maybe we can dare to dream. Yeah You got anything else about skid row? I guess the main message here is wait and see and cross your fingers and hope hope hope That's right. OK, well then that's it for the short stuff, everybody. And that means short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, myHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.