Our Story

Skid Row is an area of approximately 50 square blocks located just east of downtown Los Angeles. Also known as Central City East, the area has a longstanding history as a residential neighborhood for those with the least.

Since the early 20th century, many of the City’s working poor, unemployed, disabled and otherwise marginalized residents have found homes in the single-room occupancy hotels located throughout this relatively small neighborhood. But between 1950 and 2000, 15,000 residential hotel apartments, the most affordable housing in Los Angeles, were destroyed, threatening Skid Row’s residential community and forcing thousands of people onto the City’s shelters and sidewalks.

In 1989, community activists and business leaders of Los Angeles’ downtown community responded to the alarming disappearance of affordable, permanent housing by coming together to create Skid Row Housing Trust. The Trust swiftly mobilized private equity through low income tax credits, public finance and conventional debt to salvage hundreds of housing apartments that would have been otherwise lost. Dilapidated hotels were renovated and transformed into safe, attractive and affordable permanent housing in which low-income and formerly homeless men and women could live and thrive.

Over the past 30 years, the Trust has refined its homes to provide not just housing but a supportive community as well. The Trust has increasingly targeted its homes to long-term homeless and disabled men and women, with an emphasis on co-locating housing and services together. By providing an integrated approach to housing, primary healthcare, mental health treatment, substance abuse treatment, and counseling, the Trust provides many of the tools needed to overcome the causes of homelessness.

The combination of beautifully designed, high quality housing, professional property management, and innovative social service provision has made Skid Row Housing Trust the national leader in ending homelessness.

Skid Row Housing Trust was founded in 1989 by business and civic leaders to respond to the loss of residential hotels in Skid Row by preserving and rehabilitating the remaining hotels. From its beginning, the Trust and its board were committed to ensuring that their buildings were created with architectural beauty and design to replace slums with true homes. With its emphasis on award winning and nationally recognized architectural style and design, the Trust has proven that affordable housing does not need to be isolated from the rest of the city and can handsomely co-exist in revitalized areas.

The Trust was also one of the national pioneers to combine permanent housing and on-site social services, known as “permanent supportive housing.” By providing homeless men and women with a permanent home (as opposed to temporary shelter), and the treatment and services needed to stabilize disabilities and crises, the Trust ensured that formerly homeless residents would never become homeless again.

The Trust’s dual focus on improving lives and the surrounding neighborhood has helped define the Downtown Los Angeles community. Since its opening, the Trust has helped thousands of men and women reshape their lives and regain hope. That hope has transformed city blocks, catalyzing the restoration and creation of residential buildings that will result in a diverse, inclusive city where everyone has a place to call home.