Jeff Page barely walks half a block along Skid Row's teeming streets before he's waved down by someone with a problem _ taco trucks parked in front of a restaurant, drug dealing in a residential hotel or just a case of hard-luck blues.

In this neighborhood awash in woe, there's no shortage of tasks for Page, better known as "General Jeff" _ Skid Row's go-to-guy who's made it his mission to turn the squalid, square-mile neighborhood into a decent place to live.

"The bottom of the barrel doesn't have to be that deep," said Page, whose 6-foot-4 frame makes him easy to spot as he strides down the sidewalk where's he constantly stopping to greet people with a knucklebump and a "how ya doin,' brother?" "We're trying to get people to see this is a community, that people are putting down roots."

Fashioning a community out of chaos and neglect is no mean feat.

Skid Row houses the nation's densest concentration of homeless people, mostly addicts, parolees, the mentally ill and disabled. Some 700 people bed down nightly on trash-strewn sidewalks that stink of urine while thousands of others pour into rescue missions, seedy hotels and transitional apartments.

During the day, the street is their refuge. A man slashing himself with a knife, a woman baring her chest and and people spewing epithets into the air pass for normalcy. Police maintain a heavy presence.

For Page, who speaks animatedly with emphatic hand gestures slicing the air, that's the "broad stroke" of Skid Row. Behind the bedlam, he said, lies a vibrant community of people who have made the destination of last resort their home.

Page, 44, is one of them. A former South Los Angeles rapper who now lives on disability for mental and physical illness, he landed at the Union Rescue Mission three years ago after falling on hard times. "I thought, 'How can human beings live like this? I'm not going to be here long'," he recalled.

That was before Page found new purpose by transforming "General Jeff" _ a nickname dating to his high school basketball days _ into the man that many say is the de facto "mayor of Skid Row."

Dressed in a tie and suit vest with velveteen slippers and the ever present cap on his head, Page patrols the neighborhood, jotting down broken street lights, clogged storm drains and trash piles. Then he fires off emails to city agencies on computers borrowed around town. He gets not only answers, but action.

When the city first fixed lights and drains after his complaints, he was amazed _ and empowered _ to press on. "That was pretty big," he said.