The Brief

Dorm life at Sacramento State University suited Sofia Gonzalez. Living on campus her first year, most classes were a 10-minute walk away. Most of her closest friends lived in the same residence hall. “Everything,” she said, was “right there.”

But this summer, as she prepared to start her sophomore year, friends who applied for university housing warned Gonzalez they had been placed on a wait list. Daunted by the limited supply of upperclassmen dorms — and most of all, the cost of on-campus rent — Gonzalez opted to try the private market instead. “There was nowhere I could live in my price range near campus,” said Gonzalez, a business and marketing major. She contemplated transferring to a community college or commuting two hours each way from her parents’ Bay Area home to Sacramento.

Housing can be a major barrier for low-income students like Gonzalez around the California State University system, which includes Sacramento State and 22 other campuses. Recent estimates have found that housing accounts for half the cost of attendance at CSU, and that 11% of CSU students surveyed experience homelessness or housing insecurity. 

That reality is one reason why CSU added more than 17,000 new beds between 2014 and 2024. About 5,600 more are either under construction or approved to be built. The investments in housing are giving CSU a more residential flavor, even as many campuses maintain their long-standing dependence on commuters.

Now the question is whether CSU should build even more housing, especially in hot real estate markets where students struggle to find off-campus alternatives. A systemwide housing plan issued by CSU in July sketches potential projects that could house an additional 12,600 students as soon as 2030.

CSU officials say on-campus housing improves students’ graduation rates and could ease housing pressures for Cal State’s 460,000 students, 87% of whom still live off campus with their families or otherwise. Future housing development could be uneven based on current enrollment trends across the system, which have left empty dorms at a handful of Cal State campuses, while others rework double-occupancy rooms into triples to meet growing demand.

At the same time, state lawmakers are weighing a potentially hefty 2026 bond measure for student housing and other educational facilities at CSU, the University of California and the California Community Colleges system. Supporters say the measure, which has yet to determine a dollar amount, could help make college more affordable for low-income students.

“To make sure students are successful in their learning, they’ve got to be able to have stable housing,” Assemblymember David Alvarez, D-San Diego, who introduced the legislation, said at a hearing on Assembly Bill 48.

At Cal State Northridge, which plans to open a new 198-bed housing complex this fall, 2,000 students were on a waiting list for housing in fall 2024, CSU data show. Kevin Conn, the university’s executive director of student housing and residential life, said his colleagues field regular calls from students desperate for student housing. “Their stories are really, really heart-wrenching, because we can only do so much,” he said. “We can’t just put them in; there’s no spot to put them.”

Sacramento State has faced a similar conundrum. Last fall, there were more than 4,400 students who requested to live in campus housing, but fewer than 3,300 beds were available. The campus plans to house hundreds of additional students in the coming years.

In the meantime, Gonzalez’s frantic housing search ended off campus. She found a room 30 minutes from campus for $800 a month — within her budget, but expensive enough that she will likely need a second job to afford rent and groceries. “It’s going to be hard this next year to manage my money,” she said.

A push into housing at CSU

California State University has a long history of serving predominantly commuter students, though the university system has made major investments in student housing over the past two decades. Federal data show CSU has almost doubled its capacity to house students since 2004.

CSU’s housing program nonetheless continues to trail the University of California system, which today houses 40% of students. That’s more than 120,000 students in UC housing compared to roughly 60,000 across CSU. A majority of students in both systems live off campus.

CSU argues that adding more university housing will boost students’ academic performance. Officials point to evidence from San Diego State University, which found students living on campus had higher graduation rates and grade point averages as well as lower rates of academic probation compared to their off-campus peers. Researchers have documented similar positive effects in other states, too.

San José State University’s Spartan Village on the Paseo converted an existing hotel into student housing. Credit: San José State University/Robert Bain

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Robert Bain

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San José State University

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Another concern is cost. University officials said they strive to keep student housing affordable relative to peer institutions and nearby market-rate units.

In 2024, the CSU-wide average rate for a two-person unit in a residence hall was $9,668 over an academic year. Cal Poly Humboldt hosted the cheapest doubles, charging $6,624 on average, while San Diego State’s $14,344 average was the system’s most expensive.

If lawmakers and then voters approve a bond measure, housing projects would likely compete with the university system’s substantial deferred maintenance needs. The potential construction boom could also be dampened by a dreary economic outlook for CSU, which faces a $2.3 billion budget gap.

Such financial constraints are top of mind for Kamran Garcia Hosseinzadeh, a recent graduate and resident assistant of Cal State Dominguez Hills. CSUDH plans to add hundreds of additional beds to campus by 2026, but Garcia Hosseinzadeh is skeptical that the university has the capacity and the funding to operate expanded housing. “I definitely don’t feel confident with the future of housing here,” they said.

Declining enrollment at some CSU campuses adds to the financial uncertainty. Systemwide, 92% of student housing is filled, but at shrinking campuses like Sonoma State University and CSU East Bay, where only 64% and 58% of housing, respectively, was occupied in fall 2024.

Another Cal State campus has struggled to recover from a pandemic-era downturn in housing occupancy. Auditors reported that years of operating losses in Cal State L.A.’s housing program are depleting its reserves. Occupancy has dropped to as low as 60% in recent years, auditors said, and student housing required “unanticipated emergency repairs.” Responding to the audit, Cal State L.A.’s director of housing wrote that the university had taken “sweeping corrective measures” to improve campus housing.

University officials at other Cal State campuses said they’re confident there is room to grow on their campuses, despite warnings of an impending decline in traditional college-aged students. Even if student headcount plateaus, they said, housing wait lists and other metrics suggest untapped potential to bring students who are forced to search for off-campus housing into on-campus dorms.

An experiment in San Luis Obispo

With almost 9,000 on-campus beds, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is the housing heavyweight of the Cal State system. A large majority of the university’s students are from outside county lines, so many of the roughly 14,000 students living off campus spill into residential neighborhoods, where their sheer numbers threaten to drive already expensive rents even higher.

The housing market near the Central Coast campus is so pricey — average rent is 31% higher than the national average, according to Zillow Rentals data — students on a budget sometimes lease less-than-ideal accommodations.

Jordan Schleifer, a recent graduate who led several housing-related initiatives while vice president of Cal Poly Democrats, said many such dwellings lack basic safety fixtures like fire escapes or working smoke detectors. “It creates a situation where students are living in unsafe conditions and they can’t be fixed because they don’t want to lose the housing,” Schleifer said.

And enrollment-wise, San Luis Obispo’s master plan projects that the student headcount will increase from 22,400 in fall 2024 to 25,000 by 2035.

A rendering of a modular student housing project planned for Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

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FullStack Modular

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Financial limitations have forced San Luis Obispo’s leaders to get creative. Eager to save on construction costs — and to avoid passing those costs onto students — the university has converted some double-occupancy dorms into triples.

But the university’s most ambitious experiment is just starting. Next fall, the university will install the first in a series of modular, factory-built housing units, aiming to add as many as 4,000 beds over several years. Housing modules will get trucked to campus and then “stacked on top of each other like Legos,” said Mike McCormick, the university’s vice president of facilities management and development.

The hope is that as the factory starts producing modules at scale, the cost to produce each one will drop below traditional on-site construction. “We’re a long way from having this be a really efficient process yet, but you have to start somewhere,” McCormick said.

Lawmakers weigh student housing policy

Reports of college students living in their cars and surveys revealing the scale of student homelessness have prompted state lawmakers to take a more aggressive approach to student housing in recent years.

Typically, CSU finances housing by issuing bonds. But California lawmakers took a more active role in 2021 when they established a $2.2 billion grant program to help fund housing across CSU, UC and community colleges.

A dozen projects at CSU have been named grant recipients to date. Altogether, the projects are expected to add 5,000 beds to campuses from Cal Poly Humboldt to San Diego State. The grants provided about $660 million, which was nearly half the cost of 12 CSU projects, while the system provided the rest.

Some of that housing is now open to students. That includes a 729-bed project at San Francisco State University and San José State University’s Spartan Village on the Paseo, which converted an existing hotel into student housing.

Students move into San Francisco State’s new West Grove Commons residence hall.

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Now that the state grant funding has been awarded, advocates, including the Student Homes Coalition, have turned their attention to a bill aimed at spurring more off-campus housing by creating “campus development zones,” where the review process for housing development projects would be streamlined.

The other option, the state facilities bond AB 48, passed the Assembly and is currently in the Senate. Details, including a dollar figure, would be finalized in spring 2026 in hopes of putting the bond on the November ballot.

“The decision to send someone to college or not can literally depend on whether there’s affordable housing for them in those communities,” Alvarez said. “And so we want to make sure that there is something there, throughout our state, for families who want to send their kids to college.”

NEW YORK — In Brian Sanchez's slice of Astoria, the FIFA World Cup doesn't begin with the first match. It starts weeks earlier, with the arrival of a sticker album — and a mission.

It's a deceptively simple one: Fill the book with all the stickers representing World Cup teams, players, venues and other tournament details. But these stickers are sold in blind packs, similar to baseball or Pokémon cards, which adds to the fun and the headaches.

Sanchez, 20, has tried to complete the task before but never succeeded. This year, he planned to skip it altogether, but it was hard to ignore the chatter and excitement among his friends and family — both at home and abroad — who were all participating.

"Honestly it comes down to a little bit of FOMO," he said.

The hunt for stickers, produced by the Italian company Panini, is a decades-old World Cup tradition that's especially popular in Latin America and Europe. In the U.S., interest has been building steadily over the years, but this summer, the buzz is bigger than ever.

Jason Howarth, senior vice president of marketing and athlete relations at Panini America, said retailers reported being sold out of sticker packets within a week of the release in late April — unseen in previous World Cup cycles.

"There's a different energy coming out of it," he said. "Right now, it's outpacing where we were in 2022 by three to five times."

The surging demand comes as collectors face their toughest challenge yet. This year, they need to track down 980 distinct stickers to put the album to bed — 310 more than at the 2022 World Cup and a record number for the company. It's a reflection of the upcoming tournament's historic scale, which is expanding from 32 teams to 48 across three countries.

This edition will also be the second to last men's World Cup sticker album produced by Panini — ending a partnership that stretches back over five decades. Last month, FIFA announced that starting in 2031, U.S.-based Fanatics will be the official supplier of FIFA soccer cards, trading cards and stickers.

On a recent afternoon in Central Park, Sanchez met up with other collectors. Hunched over stacks of stickers, some two dozen people inspected the offerings with laser focus.

With only four stickers missing, Sanchez was already looking forward to earning bragging rights as the first person in his family across the finish line this year.

" I'm feeling pretty accomplished," he said. "I've been trying to get a win, and this is gonna be a huge win for me."

An expensive, labor-intensive but rewarding hobby

A single pack of seven stickers — available online, at corner stores or drugstore chains like Walgreens and CVS — now cost $2, compared to four years ago when five stickers retailed for around $1. That means simply buying enough packs to accumulate 980 stickers would total $280.

Given the costs, finishing the book is rarely a solitary pursuit, and aficionados often meet up to spread the wealth, according to Crista Latvis, 26, who organized the recent sticker swap in Central Park.

"You can't just buy your way into it," she said. "Otherwise,  it's super expensive and you've got to be very lucky."

For many, these gatherings are part of the pastime's draw.

"It's great to meet other people who are also doing it and also excited for the World Cup, especially since it's here," Latvis said.

Sebastian Clavijo, who attended Latvis' swap, said he spent tens of thousands of dollars on his quest this year. Clavijo, 32, has been collecting Panini stickers since he was 4. This year, his goal is to complete the book only with pieces featuring red and purple borders — an even rarer get.

" I just like soccer and I love collecting," he said. "That's my hobby, you know?"

In 2022, Panini introduced stickers with different colored borders that vary in rarity. That element has been an especially big hit with the trading card community and contributed to the hobby's appeal in the U.S., according to Howarth from Panini America.

Panini popularity has grown along with soccer

Demand has always existed in New York, Texas, Florida, among other big states, but it's also emerging nationwide, in places like Phoenix and the Northwest, according to Howarth.

" As soccer has grown, so has Panini," he said.

Howarth believes part of this year's popularity stems from the expanded World Cup format. Teams that have never qualified for the tournament — and therefore never been sticker-fied by Panini — are finally getting their moment.

For some, completing the sticker album is driven by nostalgia for their childhood, family or home country.

Linda Lino never heard of the hobby until she was 18, and her grandmother gave her a Panini sticker book. That was in 2014. Lino has completed every World Cup edition since, in part in memory of her late grandmother.

"It started with my grandma and then it became like a whole family thing," Lino said. "I love the community that it brings together."

That's especially true with her father, who never had the chance to collect stickers when he was a kid in Peru, Lino said. Now, the two are making up for lost time.

"My dad is so excited," she said. "He's like 'I want to help you. I want to put the stickers together.'"

Clemente Lisi, a sports journalist who has written about the Panini sticker phenomenon, said the sticker album serves as a time capsule for the World Cup. With the tournament's return to the U.S. after 32 years, he expects it will produce more first-time collectors looking for a way to remember this summer.

"This may be the only tangible thing from a World Cup unless you go to a game," he said.

Lisi, who also runs Planet Soccer on Substack, anticipates that the U.S. company Fanatics will further cater to the market at home.

" It'll even become more American and more baked into our culture," he said.

Sanchez, the college student from Astoria, dabbles in collecting other items, like vinyls and trading cards. But what he appreciates most about the Panini sticker scene is its supportive and rarely competitive nature.

" The community around the World Cup stickers is something like I've never seen before," he said. "The community is just so nice."

After countless hours of trading and visiting multiple convenience stores, Sanchez found his 980th and final sticker at the swap in Central Park. It was of the Iraqi team. He let out a gasp, followed by a smile that spanned ear to ear. "Let's goooo!"

With a mountain of duplicates left, Sanchez wasn't ready to move on just yet. His next step was to help his mother finish her album.

" I'm going to take a break," he said. "I'm going to celebrate today and then get back to it."

Topline:

The backstory: Once a year, dozens of sound artists converge on the hill with views of the harbor below to perform their audio art, which can range from serene to “beautifully weird.”

What to expect: This year includes a performer bending a bar of tin with his bare hands to get it to emit what’s called a "tin cry" and synthesizer-based soundscapes that take inspiration from both the ocean and the industrial space below.

When to go: Soundpedro is free and lasts from 7-10 p.m. Saturday.

More info at the Soundpedro website.

You may know about Union Station as an L.A. landmark or as a transportation hub — but how much do you know about its rich architectural history?

To foster that interest and knowledge, Metro created a series of public tours of the station this spring.

“There's so much that you might just walk by without really having the opportunity to delve deeply into,” said Zipporah Lax Yamamoto, deputy executive officer of Metro’s art program. “[The tours are] a really wonderful opportunity to be able to spend time with the station, learn more about the historic landmark, which belongs to all of us.”

Union Station in Los Angeles

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Myung J. Chun

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Architectural style

It’s called Union Station because when it opened in 1939, it connected the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific railroads with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railway.

While it was designed by father-and-son team Donald and John Parkinson, the architects who gave us L.A. City Hall, its style is very different. Union Station’s interior and exterior mixes art deco, Spanish colonial and other styles into a hybrid dubbed Mission Moderne.

As you begin the tour, entering from Alameda Street, tour guides ask you to look up at the decorative elements in the high ceilings. The beams and geometric patterns may look like wood — but they’re actually just painted to look that way.

A community destroyed by development

Along the way, the tour gives background on pieces created more than 30 years ago. These include "City of Dreams/River of History" by artists May Sun and Richard Wyatt in 1995. Sun’s piece uses remnants of the Chinese American homes torn down to build the station, a reference to the high price that community paid for this building’s construction.

Detail from "City of Dreams/River of History," created by artists May Sun and Richard Wyatt at Union Station.

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“It was an enormous price. Chinatown ceased to exist in this area. … The families that lived here during that time are still around and maintain archives of that time period and the original Chinatown here, and we've worked with those families to have those objects on display,” Lax Yamamoto said.

Meanwhile, Wyatt’s large-scale mural includes the face of a Chinese man, along with nine other people of different races, ethnicities and ages; a nod to the diversity of the city since its founding in the late 1700s.

There are also stops to see new art installed for the World Cup.

A mural by Richard Wyatt at Union Station

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There are three tours left in the series but the RSVPs have reached their maximum; however, Lax Yamamoto said Metro will decide whether to continue them based on what people have thought about the tours.

Meanwhile, Union Station is set to swell with people in the next couple of months as L.A. hosts World Cup games. The station is the site of an official FIFA-sponsored Fan Zone from June 25-28.

When I first came to the states many years ago, if I’d mentioned Arsenal, people would have thought I was referring to the U.S. military or something. But all that has changed. You can now watch U.K. premier league games in sports bars, most kids play soccer, and Ted Lasso is must-watch TV.

To which I say — welcome. We English are proud of the fact that soccer began with us more than 150 years ago. And every World Cup, we think, surely this will be the year that the trophy returns home — the year that we’ll win!

Queen Elizabeth II awarding the Jules Rimet World Cup Trophy to Bobby Moore after England won the 1966 World Cup final at Wembley.

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I mean it did happen … once… back in 1966. It’s such a long time ago the game was televised in black and white and shillings were still being used. My mother was nine months pregnant with my brother, and got so excited jumping up and down she went into labor and had him the next day. World Cup Willie they called him. Actually his name is David, but never mind.

Since then, every four years everyone in the U.K. watches the games with bated breath. And then something stupid will happen, and we’ll lose, like that time in 1998 when David Beckham (who played for England before he came to L.A. Galaxy) lost his temper and was sent off, and we’ll sit there, gloomy and despondent. I know because I was there in my friend’s living room in London, gloomy and despondent, thinking just once, just once, maybe could we please have a win?

David Beckham's infamous 1998 red card in the England vs. Argentina game.

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The last World Cup, I went to Ye Olde Kings Head in Santa Monica to watch England play. At 7 a.m. it was full of people already on their third pint of beer. And when the team got through to the next round, the gentle men of England ran outside the pub, whipped off their shirts and started weaving through traffic, singing football chants and acting like hooligans. I really couldn’t decide if I was embarrassed or if it felt like home.

Anyway, this time, since I’m now an American citizen, it’s in my contract that I need to support Team USA. I’m a dual citizen, though, so I’ll also be cheering for England. If by any chance Team USA and England play each other, my two selves will be watching, with a cup of tea in one hand, and a cold brewski in the other, and the polarities will explode, or something. But what will probably happen is that both teams will be eclipsed by Brazil or France playing the beautiful game… beautifully. Cheers.