What Life Is Really Like on Los Angeles’s Skid Row

Rats and poverty for some, but for others, flat-screen TVs, air conditioning, and a stocked fridge

Homeless people sit on the sidewalk by the nonprofit Midnight Mission's headquarters, in the Skid Row neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles on Nov. 25, 2021. APU GOMES/AFP via Getty Images

LOS ANGELES—The homeless tent city known as Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles is where people end up when the bottom drops out of their lives.

Sometimes, it’s where they die—one final insult added to injury.