The first skid row was Skid Road (Yesler Way) in Seattle, where logs were skidded into the water on a corduroy road for delivery to Henry Yesler’s lumber mills. After the onset of the Great Depression, the area went into decline, and skid row became synonymous with being a bad neighborhood.

Los Angeles’s Skid Row, in an area of downtown Los Angeles known as Central City East, is home to one of the largest stable populations of transient persons in the United States. Informal population estimates range from 7,000 to 8,000. First-time visitors to this area are often shocked by the sight of the cardboard box and camping tents lining the sidewalks; the juxtaposition with the gleaming glass-sheathed skyscrapers on nearby Bunker Hill is quite striking. A common joke about the high prices of houses and taxes in Los Angeles city and county limits is that, “you can’t even buy a cardboard box for that price” (with “that price” being a modest budget with which an individual seeks to secure housing). L.A.’s Skid Row is sometimes called the “Nickel,” because it is centered on Fifth Street. Most of the city’s homeless and social service providers (such as Midnight Mission, Union Rescue Mission and Downtown Women’s Center) are based on Skid Row. While downtown Los Angeles has gone through a revitalization in recent years, it has mostly skipped over the Skid Row neighborhood.