How Skid Row got to this point has been a long time in the making, with many guilty parties. In the 1970s, an unholy alliance of trade unions, business, activists and nearby nimby’s agreed on a ‘containment’ plan, that focused all homelessness, medical drug support and NGO activity to the area, with vagrants heavily discouraged from leaving that area.
At around the same time, then-Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, signed a bipartisan state bill that did for mental illness institutionalisation what that other notable leftie, Enoch Powell, did in Britain in the 1960s. It was scaled it back enormously and the area flooded with the former inmates of asylums.
Reagan was likely influenced by his alcoholic father and the belief that they should have been treated as patients, not prisoners. Cost cutting, too, played a part. Regardless, having so many unwell people “unhoused”, in the new nomenclature, went as badly as one can imagine with the benefit of hindsight — despite the fair weather.
Waves of further damaging factors followed. Crack, as cheap as it was addictive exploded in popularity in the 1980s. In the mid-noughties, hospitals were caught discharging patients onto the streets of Skid Row itself. And all the while, actual rooms to house these people in the area decreased.
Most recently, fentanyl has supercharged the drug problem and led to huge fatalities, often by contaminating other drugs and pulling more people into the hell now visible to the world through shocking videos on X. Having now seen the real thing, I can tell you that the footage of these fentanyl zombies doesn’t come close to capturing the awfulness it causes in people already near rock bottom.
Recent efforts by the Democrat super-majority in the city have been built around principles of housing first and harm reduction. It would be another cliché to tell you that I saw a blue haired woman, pride lanyard around her neck, an NGO worker looking over her total and utter policy victory. It reminded me of the line Tacitus gave to Calgacus attacking Rome: “They make a wasteland and they call it peace”. No one can say that this experiment has not been given a long trial time.
Just this weekend, a drug addict died on a Skid Row livestream. By some claims, that fatality will be one of 6 a day. The obvious truth is that these people need to be incarcerated in custom facilities that provide long-term rehabilitation and cold turkey programmes. And that crucially removes them from the mainstream population.
Exit quote:
It's easy to say crime is down when you just…stop counting crimes. https://t.co/N4yHrTrkJ8
— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) June 22, 2026
Tweet concludes, “He went to report it, but was told it looked like it done by homeless, and the city doesn’t report petty thefts by homeless. (Crime is down!) Hope the Bass/Raman voters enjoy their free beer.”