LOS ANGELES—The faces on Skid Row are changing. Younger Black women—some barely out of their teens, many with children—are arriving in growing numbers.

With 80% of women surveyed between ages 18 and 29 currently unhoused, according to the 2026 Downtown Women’s Needs Assessment produced by the Downtown Women’s Action Coalition (DWAC) and LA CAN.

The assessment is described as “a comprehensive, community-led research project detailing the lived experiences, housing barriers, and safety concerns of women navigating homelessness and extreme poverty in Skid Row.”

Skid Row is a neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles that is officially known as Central City East and according to the LA County Homeless Services and Housing, the area spans only about 50 square blocks.

Researchers also say they are witnessing a parallel surge of elderly Black women, displaced from buildings sold to predatory landlords. What the data and advocates who work with women who have been displaced are describing is a crisis claiming Black women at both ends of the age spectrum—and, they allege, a system designed to keep them there.

Black women represent 51% of respondents in the 2026 assessment—compared to 24% Latina, 14% White, and less than 1% Asian.  Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) data cited in that same report estimates Black people make up 52% of the unsheltered homeless population in Skid Row.

Data for the survey were collected during the spring and summer of 2025 and included 20 semi-structured interviews and nine focus groups (consisting of 8-12 women)

And participants were recruited largely through community outreach efforts by DWAC staff, volunteers and by direct outreach to current DWAC members who currently and/or formerly resided in Skid Row.

The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, National Representative of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Eternal Leader of the Nation of Islam, spoke on the conditions impacting America in his message delivered in Newark, New Jersey, on April 28, 1995, and published in The Final Call titled, “What’s Troubling America.”

“In America, we have millions today who are homeless. We have many more millions who are sick, imprisoned, impoverished and weak, and it appears as though the conservative element of the country is moving away from care for the poor, the weak, the helpless, and the children and catering to the desires of those that have.

But it is the poor and the weak who built the country.  It is the poor and the weak who have fought, bled and died to maintain America as a great nation,” Minister Farrakhan said.

“Now America is turning her back on the weak and blaming the condition of the country on the poor, on the Black, on the Hispanic. 

In reality, the mismanagement of the wealth and people of this country is the fault of those who are at the top who have held power, who have manipulated the masses of the people against the good of America and the good of the world,” he added.

Shameka Foster, a housing and rights organizer with the Los Angeles Community Action Network, knows the crisis of homelessness from the inside. When COVID-19 shuttered businesses across Los Angeles in 2020, she was working as an on-call security guard without a set post.

Her hours evaporated.  Her roughly $1,400-a-month studio apartment—marketed as affordable housing but simultaneously listed at $2,100 on the open market—became impossible to hold. By 2021, she was in a tent on Skid Row with her 19-year-old son.

She described the impossible math of trying to catch up: returning to full-time work while still carrying months of back rent, every paycheck gone before it cleared.

“It was like I was so far behind,” Ms. Foster said. “When I did go back to work full-time, I was paying rent and still owed rent.”

Her son spent only a few days in the tent before going to stay with family on his father’s side—a temporary refuge that put relatives at risk since he wasn’t on anyone’s lease. The experience changed him, she stated.

He was outgoing, skateboarded and did well in school, but went quiet, she recalled. He never graduated—a COVID casualty of a system that couldn’t hold students together through the lockdowns, she said.

Ms. Foster’s story, while her own, fits a documented pattern. The 2026 Women’s Needs Assessment found that for nearly half of the women surveyed, homelessness did not begin in Skid Row—it began in childhood.

The report describes a pipeline: generational poverty, family separation, early displacement, and economic exclusion forming a through-line across decades. “Women are not falling through cracks in the system,” the report states. “The system itself produces and reproduces their displacement.” 

Jamie Garcia, an organizer with DWAC and LA CAN, pushed back hard on the narrative that addiction and mental illness define Skid Row. She said the framing is not only inaccurate—it is dangerous.

“It’s really important that we uplift economic precarity as the cause of houselessness —not just mental health, not just substance use,” said Ms. Garcia to The Final Call.

Between 40% and 56% of women across all age groups surveyed cited unaffordability as the primary barrier to securing stable housing, according to the 2026 needs assessment report.  For a woman earning minimum wage with children to feed, there is no equation that works, researchers found.

The report documents a compounding toll beyond housing.  Approximately 60% of women surveyed report having a disability, and more than 70% of older women live with a disability. 

Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they worried in the past year about having enough food, and close to half reported having very little control over their food choices. 

Ms. Foster alleged a particularly devastating pattern for women with children. She said that women in crisis who call 211—a free, confidential information referral service for L.A. County residents—and are referred to Skid Row-area shelters can find the very act of being unhoused used against them in custody proceedings.

“They (case workers) figure you’re not capable of taking care of your children when you’re just out of work,” she said. “They’re setting you up for failure,” she further alleged.

The Final Call contacted the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services regarding her allegations.  No response has been received yet.

Ms. Foster and Ms. Garcia also described what happens when shelters turn women away—sometimes for lacking paperwork, sometimes simply for lack of space.  A coercive cycle follows, alleges Ms. Garcia: women left outside, vulnerable, pushed into dangerous arrangements in exchange for protection.

“It’s a survival mechanism,” Ms. Foster added. “You’re new out here, you have men trying to take advantage.”

She now watches elderly Black women arrive, she alleged, displaced from buildings sold to what she describes as predatory landlords seeking to repurpose them. LA CAN has an active slumlord campaign targeting these practices, she said. 

She sees elderly women on blankets outside shelters, without tents, in the open air.  “You see them barely surviving,” Ms. Foster said. “And I’m talking about people that want help, that do the footwork—but the people in positions to help them are working against them all the time.”

The solution, both women say, is not complicated. It is just not being done. Ms. Garcia said the evidence in the social sciences is unambiguous: when people are given stable housing, they can begin addressing everything else—health, family, employment. “The solution to houselessness is houses,” she said. “It is evidence-based practice.”

Ms. Foster emphasized the point, stating that what is needed is: “Permanent, dignified housing, not with case management harassing you, working against you.  It starts there.”