Hillside Village, one of three available residential village options, contains 9 buildings, including Los Cerritos. A tenth building, La Playa Residence Hall, is scheduled to open by fall 2026. Charlotte LoCicero | Long Beach Current
The email came on graduation day.
I was sitting in my car, waiting out the student parking lot madness after just waving goodbye to my high school, when the message pinged on my phone, “You have been waitlisted for student housing.”
Everything I was so sure of instantly crumbled before me, and all I could think about as students tripped over themselves to leave our school and suburban town behind was that I was now cemented here.
From the moment I walked the stage, I was in for the long and uncertain road Long Beach State’s housing shortage thrusts you into, and it’s a road walked by thousands of students in the CSU system.
While college is inherently an uncertain place, full of fear, excitement, opportunity and caution, it should still be in our university’s best interest to ensure that, among all of it, displacement doesn’t have to be a factor.
According to Education Source, “CSU officials say on-campus housing improves students’ graduation rates and could ease housing pressures for Cal State’s 460,000 students.”
This fact is not surprising as people seek connection within a community that is new and exciting. However, how can students plant their roots if they cannot even find a place to live?
The simple fact is there’s not nearly enough housing on our campus for incoming and returning students.
The uncertainty of where students will live goes hand-in-hand with how our school is adapting to the increasing demand for on-campus living.
Recently, the Student Planning Commission approved plans given by the Long Beach City Council to convert an empty office building nearly a block from CSULB’s off-campus Beachside dorms into student housing.
The building is vast, overlooking Recreation Park Golf Course from its head-to-toe glass windows, and it could potentially house not only CSULB students, but students attending Long Beach Community College and Pacific Coast University of Law.
While the prospect is an exciting one, I can’t help but remain skeptical. Yes, this could change our student housing crisis exponentially, but will it actually happen?
The building was bought nearly a year ago, and there has been little progress made since then.
This is especially concerning, considering that in February of this year, the city of Long Beach returned a $5.6 million grant for the construction of the Tiny Home campus.
This building plan would have provided sustainable housing to displaced people in Long Beach, alleviating the city’s unhoused issue.
Its construction began in 2023, with Engineering and Art students from CSULB helping design the houses. However, the project was scrapped nearly two years later, wasting the $2.9 million already spent on construction.
Education Source also reports that “housing accounts for half the cost of attendance at CSU, and that 11% of CSU students surveyed experience homelessness or housing insecurity.”
How can students remain hopeful they will be guaranteed a secure place to live when they are consistently met with “perhaps” and “maybe nots” when it comes to the building of these housing developments?
The construction takeover of our university proclaims a promise of “greater campus life,” but what makes campus greater than an influx of students actually living on it?
University officials must prioritize our students by focusing on ideas that will benefit them, rather than considering potential housing plans or prolonged projects that may take longer than expected.
They must approach student living as a necessity to be fulfilled, ensuring certainty among our students throughout their time at CSULB.