The Hope Center estimates that 48% of college students experience housing insecurity. At Long Beach City College, administrators with few other options have created a Safe Parking Program where students who live in their cars can drive into a staff parking lot that is otherwise unused overnight. A security guard was hired to keep the students safe. The students can access outlets and wifi, and are each given a key to a nearby bathroom.
While living in cars remains incredibly bleak, students in the program describe the new stability and safety as enabling them to stay in school when they might otherwise have had to leave.
The Hechinger Report describes other extraordinary measures that campuses are taking to support unhoused students. Some colleges are holding dorm beds open for students with short-term housing emergencies. One campus partnered with an assisted living center to house some students on grounds in exchange for volunteer time in service of the elderly residents. Another provides a number of "napping pods" where exhausted students can try to catch up on sleep between classes. Many are trying to build more student housing and are stymied by funding shortfalls and too little land on which to build; others are contracting with budget hotels.
None of this has triggered broader commitments from policy makers to increase the value of Pell Grants, to fund additional affordable housing, or to fund more staff to help steer students to safety net resources.
The administrators interviewed in this Hechinger Report article all acknowledge that they're putting band aids on deep wounds while the structural inequalities causing injury to students only get worse.
No poor or working-class student should settle for being applauded for their "resilience" in the face of such severe structural inequalities unless those offering the praise are also fiercely and visibly working for educational equity, for basic needs like food and housing, and for spaces for students to become self-advocates within systems stacked against them.
