An especially dilapidated section of a city, characterized by run-down or abandoned buildings, alcoholism and homelessness, and vices such as drug dealing and prostitution
You can refer to the poorest part of town, where drunks and homeless people live, as skid row. He became a skid row type of drunkard. A squalid district inhabited chiefly by derelicts and vagrants
() Probably from skid road (“a road along which logs were skidded”), transferred to the streets of towns where loggers had recreation on their time off.