Skid Row Los Angeles

The number of people who died on downtown L.A.'s skid row has declined by 36% in the last four years, according to city records, the latest sign of major changes on what for decades has been the city's epicenter of homelessness and drug-dealing. Excluding murders and suicides, 60 people died in the skid row area in 2008, according to Los Angeles Police Department statistics. In 2005, there were 94 such deaths.

A respected skid row facility that provides shelter and counseling to homeless people became a site for drug dealing, leading to a double homicide inside the Lamp Lodge earlier this year, according to police detectives and court records. Los Angeles Police Department detectives allege that dealers sold rock cocaine and heroin out of the Lamp Lodge for months, a practice that ended after one of the alleged drug dealers and another man were shot to death there in April. Lamp officials said claims of widespread drug dealing at the facility are overblown.

Craby Joe's bar was known as a dive for cheap, bottom-shelf liquor and peeling faux-wood on downtown's South Main Street. It closed two years ago after it was made famous by author Charles Bukowski and infamous by former Los Angeles City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo, whose office called the place a magnet for "rock cocaine sales." If Craby Joe's reflected a troubled old downtown, a developer is proposing a bar at the site that would reflect the gentrified downtown of lofts, boutique hotels and night life.

Steve Richardson, who goes by the name "Gen. Dogon" on the streets of L.A.'s skid row, is the kind of person federal regulators had in mind when they created the digital-television transition's subsidy. Richardson's job at a civil rights group leaves him with barely enough money for food. He can't afford a converter box to keep his antenna-equipped TV working on June 12, when stations across the country turn off their analog signals and start broadcasting solely in digital.