Almost one in five Los Angeles Community College District students has been homeless in the past two years. That’s the conclusion of a survey the community college district released Thursday to uncover housing and food insecurity rates among students.
Additionally, almost two-thirds of students have experienced food insecurity, according to the survey of students last October. That could mean they didn’t have enough to eat or didn’t have access to balanced meals, but of those who took the survey, 59 percent said they didn’t have enough food or enough money to buy more.
The district unveiled the results during a news conference at the Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, one of two colleges in the district where the rates of food and housing insecurity were the highest.
“Lots of people struggle during college. These struggles, of our students in Los Angeles, are real, and they are more severe today,” said Scott Svonkin, president of the board of the college district. “The cost of housing in Los Angeles has skyrocketed. There’s a shortage of affordable housing.”
As a result of the survey, the college district, Los Angeles County and city leaders will now look for “tangible solutions to house our students, to make sure they’re fed,” he said.
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The survey wasn’t randomly administered. Rather, all professors in the district told their students about the survey, and students could then choose to take it. The sample size is small — 4.4 percent of the roughly 135,000 students enrolled in the fall of 2016 participated.
The survey also found specific groups were particularly hard hit. Black students, Native American students, those who had been in foster care or served in the Armed Forces, those who were divorced or widowed or who had children all had higher rates of food insecurity, housing insecurity and homelessness than the overall averages in the survey. For example, 18.6 percent of students said they had been homeless in the year leading up to the survey. But among students who had been in foster care, 38 percent said they had been homeless. Homelessness in the survey included staying in a shelter, being evicted from a home, not knowing where to sleep and not having a home at all.
Los Angeles Community College District Trustee Mike Eng, who Svorkin credited with leading the effort to survey students on homelessness, said that he had questioned why it took some students six years to complete two-year degrees.
“The overwhelming challenge, I was told, is that it was their quality of life and the living conditions that mattered,” Eng said. “ ‘If you are insecure about where you’re going to get the next meal from, of which almost two-thirds of our students are, and if you don’t know where you’re going to sleep tonight, where almost one out of every five have that, how the heck can you expect us to concentrate on our classes and do well?’” Eng said he heard from students.
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Among the near-term solutions the college district is considering, Svonkin and Eng said, are efforts to make food in campus cafeterias cheaper and in some cases, free. Eng also has asked the college district to examine the possibility of building student housing that would rent at below-market rates.
Two Los Angeles Trade-Technical students — Myriah Smiley, 19, and Norma Castillo, 30 — offered brief, but emotional, words about the challenges of being a student without a stable home.
Speaking after the news conference to the Southern California News Group, Castillo said she has been staying at her sister’s home for the last two weeks while studying to be an electrician. She considers herself homeless because she doesn’t have a stable home, she said.
Castillo lost her job as a bank security guard in 2013 and was unable to pay her rent, so she lost her apartment. A criminal record has made it impossible to get another job, she said. Since then, she’s had to jump from place to place, sometimes staying in her car or a shelter, but never with her 11-year-old son.
“Since then, I cannot get a job because I get rejected everywhere that I try to apply,” she said. “That’s the reason why I’m in this situation.”
