Skid row
[4] Areas in the United States and Canada identified by this nickname include Pioneer Square in Seattle;[5] Old Town Chinatown in Portland, Oregon;[6] Downtown Eastside in Vancouver; Skid Row in Los Angeles; the Tenderloin District of San Francisco; and the Bowery of Lower Manhattan.
[4] The term was in common usage in the mid-19th century and came to refer not just to the corduroy roads themselves, but to logging camps and mills all along the Pacific Coast.
[8] The source of the term "skid road" as an urban district is heavily debated, and is generally identified as originating in Seattle and Yesler Way.
[19] Due to its concentration of service providers, the area around Mass and Cass has attracted a large number of people dealing with homelessness and drug addiction, especially after the closure of the treatment facility on Long Island.
[22] Housing and homeless advocates also protested Acting Mayor Kim Janey's October 19, 2021 announcement that Boston would begin clearing out the tent city.
[25] In July 2020, an estimated 1,350 people were camped out within Denver city limits, and an advocacy group for homeless individuals counted 664 tents.
Lincoln Park has a high concentration of tent-dwelling homeless individuals, and reports of criminal activity and drug abuse are commonplace.
Initially more predominately Chinese when it was established and active in the 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries, it became a red-light district after World War II era.
According to some, the eastern boundary is a low rent group of houses near Texas Southern University referred to as "Sugar Hill".
The Third Ward was what Stephen Fox, an architectural historian who lectured at Rice University, referred to as "the elite neighborhood of late 19th-century Houston".
The area was originally home to many cheap, low-quality hotels, popular with itinerant laborers and new arrivals to the city owing to its proximity to the train station and central location.
As downtown has been revitalized since the 1990s and the adjacent Arts District area has gone from a desolate industrial wasteland to a major center for tourism, entertainment, and upscale housing development, Skid Row has become increasingly hemmed in by bustling, populated neighborhoods.
Between 2005 and 2007, several local hospitals and suburban law-enforcement agencies were accused by Los Angeles Police Department and other officials of transporting those homeless people in their care to Skid Row.
Westlake and Venice Beach have had issues with street crime and homelessness, and elements of skid rows and red-light districts.
Philadelphia once had a highly visible skid row centered on Vine Street, just west of the approaches to the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.
[46] A long-time camp largely hidden from public view in a gulch alongside Conrail tracks, spanning an area roughly from N 2nd Street to Kensington Avenue, was cleared in 2017.
The name "Skid Road" was in use in Seattle by the 1850s when the city's historic Pioneer Square neighborhood began to expand from its commercial core.
[53] The Skid Road became the demarcation line between the affluent members of Seattle and the mill workers and more rowdy portion of the population.
[53] The street's end near the mill attracted cookhouses and inexpensive hotels for itinerant workers, along with several establishments that served beer and liquor.
During the Great Depression, the railway rights-of-way and other vacant lots in the area were thronged by the unemployed and poor, and the pattern of social decay became well-established.
[citation needed] A portion of Vancouver's Skid Row, Gastown, has also been gentrified; however it is in a difficult coexistence with the nearby impoverished Downtown Eastside along East Hastings Street.
Additional sites have been established with approval from Health Canada in 2017 and 2018 as part of the strategy for dealing with the epidemic of lethal opioid (primarily fentanyl) overdoses.
[77][78] Puerto Vallarta, Mexico's "romantic area" by its boardwalks has issues of homelessness, vagrancy, open drug abuse, fighting, and public violence.
While specific "skid rows" are not thoroughly documented in articles, at least mainly in English, crystal meth is often shipped in from Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana, Baja California, both border cities.
This number is less than half a percent of Tijuana's population, and far fewer than the 9,160 homeless individuals in neighboring San Diego County, California.
[81] The academic research institute, El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, concluded in 2014 that nearly half of people experiencing homeless in Tijuana are deportees from the US, based on their surveys of a specific shelter.
[85] In January 2017, reports of a camp of homeless people being moved from under Flinders Street station to an organized housing facility made the News.com.au headlines.
[86] The Victorian state government spent $10 million on this project, with the intent of providing 30 new permanent modular and relocatable homes on public land to be in place by the end of 2017.
During the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia in March, to June 2020, the Victorian government provided $15 million to homelessness organisations to find temporary accommodation in hotels for people who were sleeping on the street.
On June 13, 2020, it was announced that a further $9.8 million was spent on the project to keep them there in the short term, but also help them plan a pathway into more long-term, stable accommodation.
