The Brief

Heading into his first semester this fall at Feather River College, Conor Robinson considered camping in a tent after struggling to find a 1-bedroom apartment he could afford.

Larissa Griffith found free housing her first semester, but it came with a catch: She was on call, 24 hours a day, including holidays, at her landlord’s farm.

In the town of Quincy, population 1,580, housing options are sparse for students in this rural community in Northern California. Demand has also grown, especially after the 2021 Dixie Fire, which tore through nearly a million acres of Sierra Nevada mountains and forest — about the size of Rhode Island — and destroyed hundreds of homes across the surrounding Plumas County.

Right after the fire, the state granted the college over $500,000 from the state to design solutions for the worsening student housing crisis, but it was a kind of “false hope,” said Carlie McCarthy, the college’s vice president of student services.

Twice, the school submitted its plans — a $74 million proposal to build over 120 beds for students — and each time, the state Legislature was unable to fund it. The state has promised to help community colleges build housing for their students, but after committing funds to 19 other community college housing projects, the state Legislature tried to delay spending the money in order to close a multi-billion dollar budget deficit. Most of those projects are still moving forward through a new financing mechanism, but the Legislature has effectively run out of money for any other projects.

Feather River College is one of 35 housing proposals that remain in limbo, with no additional state funding available. Those projects include a proposal from Mendocino College, where massive wildfires destroyed hundreds of homes in a community similar to Quincy and Santa Monica College, which submitted its proposal before the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles.

Santa Monica College is still gathering data about the scope of the fires’ impact on students, but early estimates based on students’ addresses show that around 600 Santa Monica College students were living in an evacuation zone or within areas directly impacted by those fires, said Susan Fila, who oversees students’ health and wellbeing at the college.

The aftermath of the Palisades Fire on Jan. 15, 2024.

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Ted Soqui

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CalMatters

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College presidents across the state say the new housing projects are a long-term solution to wildfire recovery and to the state’s enduring affordability crisis, which has hit community college students hard. In study after study, researchers have found that around 20% of California community college students experience homelessness at some point over the course of a year, and many more struggle to pay rent.

The California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, which oversees the state’s 116 community colleges, is asking for $1.1 billion in bond money from the state Legislature this year for affordable housing projects, though those dollars would fund just half of the outstanding proposals. The governor has until July 1 to finalize the 2025-26 budget.

Other competing budget priorities, such as LA wildfires recovery, could take precedence over affordable housing, said Wrenna Finche, the vice president of administrative services at Ohlone College in Fremont, which has failed to secure state funding for two different affordable housing proposals for its Bay Area campuses. “I wouldn’t expect a lot of movement on it this year.”

Fighting for student housing

A few of California’s rural community colleges have offered housing for decades, mostly as a means to mitigate long commutes to school. In Plumas County, some students drive over an hour — on a good day — just to make it to Feather River College. Snowstorms and rock slides frequently close mountain roads, delaying travel even more.

Many community colleges were designed for students who live with their parents and commute to school, but those demographics are changing. Fewer students between the ages of 18 and 22 are enrolling in community college, and those who do enroll often live independently. As a result, demand for housing has grown all across the state, including in coastal areas and in other rural regions, such as the Imperial Valley.

Conor Robinson, a student at Feather River College, talks about the challenges he faced finding a place to live while attending the school in Quincy, on Feb. 12, 2025.

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Robinson is 36 and enrolled at Feather River College after making a career change. He’s studying ecosystem restoration and applied fire management, the only such program in the state, and wants to continue working on prescribed burns after graduation.

Griffith, 20, is a former foster youth. She moved from the Sacramento area to Quincy in order to follow her dream of running a dude ranch. Feather River College is the only school in the state to offer a bachelor’s degree program in equine and ranch management.

The campus includes horse stables, a fish hatchery and other nods to the Plumas County economy, which relies heavily on logging and outdoor recreation. To meet the needs of students like Robinson and Griffith, the college has multiple dormitories with a total capacity of about 260 students. Unlike the rest of campus, where buildings are carefully designed to blend with the surrounding forest, most of the dorms are purely utilitarian. The buildings are bare, white rectangles, except for a few hints of student life. Cowboy boots and spurs sit outside many doorways; a dirt trail connects the dormitories to class.

Rent is around $500 a month, including utilities. Signups for the upcoming fall semester opened on Feb. 3, but two days later, registration was already full, said Kevin Trutna, the college president. By putting three beds in a single room, the college can house over 300 people, but even then, there’s a waitlist. This semester, he said over 80 students failed to get a campus housing spot.

“As a former foster youth, it’s sink or swim,” said Griffith, who received one of the coveted housing spots in a bedroom she shares with an equine studies major. “Anything I get, I had to fight for.”

By combining four different state and federal grants, plus a private scholarship, she receives more than $20,000 this year in financial aid, which is more than enough to cover the monthly rent. The housing is a significant upgrade, she said, especially compared to her foster home and the previous “free” housing arrangement.

An aerial view from a drone of two dorm buildings tucked between trees on campus at Feather River College in Quincy on Feb. 12, 2025.

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Robinson wasn’t interested in living in a shared dormitory, which is the only campus housing available, so he found a mobile home off-campus this semester.

“I didn’t feel like I had a choice but to accept the one place that I had found, even though it wasn’t ideal,” he said.

After moving in, he spent hours shampooing the carpets and cleaning up his unit to make it livable, but he said he’s still worried it may be unsafe because of lingering mold and lack of ventilation for the stove. He pays $850 a month, but the landlord wants to move in at the end of April, so he’ll need to find a new place soon.

Finding housing alternatives through RV parks and bond dollars

After Trutna realized the state was unlikely to fund the Feather River College’s next housing development, he called Dayne Lewis, the owner of a local RV park that abuts the campus, to see if the park had additional capacity. Out of the park’s 31 RVs, Lewis said roughly half are students.

“I would fill this place completely with students but the timing doesn’t always work out,” he said. Since the Dixie and North Complex fires tore through Plumas County, many state and federal contractors have moved to Quincy, the largest city in the county, to work on rebuilding the region. Those contractors now compete with students for temporary housing, he said.

River Ranch RV Park resident Emma Hernandez is a student at Feather River College. The school’s campus is a short walk from the RV park in Quincy. Feb. 12, 2025.

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Antelope Valley College in Lancaster purchased a $9 million plot of land for its proposed housing project, but it now sits empty since state funding fell through, said Jennifer Zellet, the college president. Like administrators at Ohlone College and Santa Monica College, Zellet said she’s exploring a “public-private partnership,” in which a local nonprofit builds and operates a housing development on that land using a portion of regional bond dollars.

These partnerships are a popular but imperfect solution. In Long Beach, where the community college proposed building over 240 units, President Mike Muñoz said he won’t resort to a public-private partnership. Because housing would be run by a private entity, not a college, he said it’s common for these kinds of projects to charge students higher rent. Instead, he said the college plans to rely entirely on local bond dollars, even if that means delays on other campus projects that need bond money, such as a new training center for police officers and firefighters.

Rural parts of the state, such as Plumas and Mendocino counties, have fewer alternatives. The projects are often smaller since there are fewer residents, and as a result, the profit margins are thin, said Mendocino College President Timothy Karas. Both Trutna, the president of Feather River College, and Karas say that they have no bond dollars available.

A new exhibit in L.A. — Vehicles of Expression: The Craft of the Skateboard — arrives this weekend, highlighting the cultural impact, history and artistry of handmade skateboards.

It’s the latest exhibit at Craft in America Center, a museum and library that highlights handcrafted artwork.

Todd Huber, skateboard historian and founder of the Skateboarding Hall of Fame, said before 1962, it wasn’t possible to buy a skateboard in a store.

“Skateboarding started as a craft,” Huber said on AirTalk, LAst 89.3’s daily news program. “Somewhere in the 50s until 1962, if you wanted to sidewalk surf, as they called it, you had to make your own out of roller skates.”

What to expect

Emily Zaiden, the director and lead curator of the Craft in America Center based in Los Angeles, told LAist’s AirTalk the exhibit was tricky to curate.

“What we wanted to do was focus on both the history and then expand into how this has been an object that people have interpreted in so many different ways since the very beginning,” Zaiden said.

Artists who craft skateboards not only think of design, but also of the features that give riders the ability to do tricks, such as wheelies and kickflips.

“The ways that people have constructed boards, engineered boards, design boards … people are really renegade, which I think is really the spirit of skateboarding overall,” Zaiden said. “This very independent, out-of-the-box approach and making boards that allow them to do all kinds of wacky tricks and do all kinds of things that no one imagined possible physically with their body, but through the object of the board.”

Know before you go

The exhibit at Craft in America Center opens to the public on Saturday. Admission is free. The museum is open from noon to 6 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Plans to redesign a stretch of Pico Boulevard with protected bike lanes are moving forward, with construction expected to begin later this year. The lanes are slated to open in spring 2027, just in time for the 2028 Summer Olympics. 

The project would reconfigure about 3.4 miles of Pico between Crenshaw Boulevard and Figueroa Street, adding protected bike lanes, new crosswalks and other street improvements along a major east-west corridor through central Los Angeles.

Drivers and pedestrian would notice some important changes to the street when the project is complete. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation’s changes will allow cyclists to ride in lanes separated from traffic by barriers or curbs. LADOT will also install new traffic signals at Manhattan Place and New Hampshire Avenue, while also shortening the distance pedestrians need to travel to cross Pico Boulevard.

Additionally, sidewalks and curb ramps that are in poor condition will undergo repairs.

City officials say the changes are aimed at improving safety along the corridor.

Between 2014 and 2023, authorities reported 75 crashes on Pico Boulevard that resulted in severe injuries or deaths, according to city data. Pedestrians were involved in 52 of those crashes, and all 11 fatalities along the corridor during that period were pedestrians.

Plans to redesign a stretch of Pico Boulevard with protected bike lanes are moving forward, with construction expected to begin later this year.

About 12% of injury crashes involved cyclists, according to the latest data.

The bicycle lane proposal would also bring changes to parking along the corridor.

About 270 of the roughly 480 existing street parking spaces along Pico Boulevard would be removed to make room for the protected bike lanes, most of them on the north side of the street. LADOT officials plan to add some parking on nearby side streets where possible and extend parking hours for about 95 existing spaces along the street.

Drivers could see slightly longer travel times, according to officials. LADOT spokesperson Colin Sweeney said the new configuration could add roughly one to two minutes of travel time per mile during peak traffic periods. 

“The department does not expect significant spill-over as a result of these changes but will evaluate the corridor following the project and can respond to such activity with signal timing adjustments and turn restrictions to prevent cut through activity,” he said in a statement.

The transportation department conducted outreach last year with an online survey that received more than 1,100 responses. According to the department, 74% of respondents said they preferred a protected bike lane over a standard painted lane.

The department said an updated project fact sheet and a feedback form in English, Spanish and Korean will be posted on its website later this month. 

The post A dangerous stretch of Pico Boulevard is getting a major redesign appeared first on LA Local.

The apartment building planned on East Morris Avenue in Modesto is exactly the kind of thing that California’s political leaders want to see a whole lot more of: The project promises 44 units of affordable housing — half reserved for people without homes. It’s received zoning approval, weathered public feedback, earned the support of local elected officials and sits beside a busy bus line. Once built, the project promises on-site mental health services, job training and Zumba classes.

What the project lacks is money.

Having quilted together a financial patchwork of local government and corporate grants, private debt, and a plot of land donated by a foundation, it remains just shy of the total needed to break ground.

Six years and 13 funding applications after it was first proposed, the Morris Village project sits ready, but waiting.

An estimated 39,880 affordable units across California are stuck in financial purgatory, according to a new report by Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit that funds, consults and advocates for affordable housing. That’s 461 “shovel-ready developments” that, like the one on East Morris, are fully designed, legally green-lit and backed with a significant — but still insufficient — amount of money.

Many have “been sitting for a year or two waiting for funding,” said Justine Marcus, policy director for Enterprise’s Northern California office and one of the report’s co-authors. “There’s no exit route right now. It’s a bottleneck.”

For many developers and affordable housing advocates, that bottleneck represents an especially frustrating inconsistency of California public policy. Lawmakers are desperate to see the state build more homes — of all kinds, but especially for people with the least ability to pay the state’s exorbitant rents. State housing regulators have ordered local governments to plan for the construction of an additional 2.5 million units by the end of the decade. One million of those are supposed to be for people making less than 80% of each region’s median income.

As a general rule, that’s a population of hard-up renters that the private market has been unable to profitably serve at scale. To fill that gap, non-profit low-income housing developers typically turn to taxpayer-funded support. At the moment, according to the report, there isn’t enough of that to go around.

Enterprise took publicly available but hard-to-parse applicant lists from seven subsidy programs administered by various wings of California’s state government going back three years. With a combination of number crunching and a little inference, the report estimates that clearing the current backlog would require an extra $4.1 billion, split between state administered grants, low-cost loans and tax write-offs.

Once awarded, this final layer of state subsidy has to be spent in relatively short order. That means this list of 39,880 units comprise a group of affordable housing projects that are all but ready to go, said Marcus. “They kinda have to have their (stuff) together.”

Case in point: Two-thirds of the projects on the list have already received support from at least one other state program. Those dollars aren't awarded to just any developer, said Betsy McGovern-Garcia, vice president of Self-Help Enterprises, one of two non-profits behind Morris Village.

“These are all projects that are close to amenities,” she said. “These are all projects providing resident services. These are all projects that are financially feasible...They are all meeting the bar for what we want to see as a state out of our affordable housing community.”

In February, McGovern-Garcia and her colleagues applied for a final round of financial support from the state “to close the gap” and finally start construction.

“We are optimistic this might be our round,” she said in an interview, her fingers crossed.

A moving bottleneck

California has seen gridlock in affordable housing production before, but the precise location of the traffic jam has changed over time.

When Nevada Merriman was leading a team of affordable developers in Silicon Valley a decade ago, she said local approval was the major hold-up. Getting the legal okay to build low-income housing on a particular site in a particular town required developers to run a gauntlet of planning department and city council meetings, win over hostile neighbors with costly concessions, community meetings and design revisions and to fend off the ever-present possibility of litigation. Because relatively few projects survived that ordeal, the competition for funding on the other side wasn’t especially stiff, said Merriman, who is now policy advocate for MidPen Housing, an affordable developer in San Mateo County.

That began to change earlier this decade. California lawmakers began passing laws overriding these local impediments — especially for affordable projects. All of a sudden more projects were clearing those early regulatory hurdles and competing for Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, the federal government’s signature affordable housing construction subsidy. The bottleneck moved further up the road.

But then that too began to change late last year. Buried in President Donald Trump’s signature tax bill from 2025 was a significant boost to the tax credit program. (Specifically, the law increased the total supply of one type of credit while allowing another kind to be spread out over twice as many projects).

Which brings us to the latest bottleneck.

Now projects can get through local approval. They can more easily acquire the final and most important layer of federal financing. But project sponsors typically can’t apply for that until all other financial holes are plugged.

“We’re looking for state sources to fill that gap,” said Merriman. “We want to make sure we don’t leave those federal sources on the table.”

MidPen currently has 1,198 units spread across seven developments waiting for that last bit of funding, she said. “Should there be a source…there’s a pipeline that is ready to go.”

“There’s no exit route right now. It’s a bottleneck.”Justine Marcus, Northern California policy director, Enterprise Community PartnersCalifornia’s last major infusion of public affordable housing dollars came in the form of a voter-approved bond in 2018. That well has run dry. A hodgepodge of funding streams remain.

Adding together funding that has already been approved by legislators but not yet spent and a variety of other state and federal sources, California’s Housing and Community Development department says at least $1.8 billion should be available for affordable developer applicants this year. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal for the coming fiscal year doesn’t include any new discretionary spending beyond that.

Boosters of more funding have reasons to be optimistic. Newsom has taken such an austere posture in early budget negotiations before only to have the Legislature successfully pour hundreds of millions of dollars of affordable housing subsidies back into the final budget agreement.

California lawmakers are also considering a record-breaking $10 billion affordable housing bond for the 2026 ballot. If a majority of voters go for that, “we’d be off to the races,” said Merriman.

Cutting costs

One way to get more affordable housing built is by spending more money. The other is trying to make the existing money go further by cutting costs.

The cost of affordable housing construction is notoriously high in California: A 2025 study estimated that tax credit-financed projects here cost two- to four-times the amount of comparable projects in Colorado and Texas. There is no single reason for this disparity. Land costs in California are significantly higher. So too, often, is the cost of labor. Regulatory barriers like restrictive zoning, slow permitting and stiff impact fees are frequently named as culprits. Sometimes old-fashioned construction methods and materials get blamed.

But there’s also the cost of just waiting around.

A typical affordable development in California will have two or three public funding sources, with some drawing on six or more. Many of these sources are awarded on their own timelines. Each has its own program-specific requirements that can take time to meet. Some are conditional on the receipt of another. As time goes by, developers still have to make payroll, pay interest on pre-construction loans and watch as inflation drives construction costs up further. As delays compound, funding sources that have already been secured might expire, setting things back further.

Each additional funding source delays the start of construction on a project by an average of four months, adding an extra $20,460 per unit, according to an analysis by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley.

The Newsom administration is currently tinkering under the hood of California’s affordable housing finance system in an effort to speed things up.

Last year, the governor proposed the creation of the state’s first ever cabinet-level housing agency. The California Housing and Homelessness Agency is scheduled to take over the state’s disparate housing loan and grant programs. The governor’s office also proposed legislative language that would force the new agency and the Treasurer’s Office to operate in tandem, giving affordable housing developers a single place to apply for the state’s various funding programs — and to cut out some of the time they spend stuck in line.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

President Donald Trump threatened to withhold his signature on all bills until Congress passes stricter federal voting requirements — a move that escalates his efforts to change election rules ahead of the 2026 midterms.

In a social media post Sunday, Trump said he won't sign any bills into law until Congress passes the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act.

"I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed," Trump wrote.

If passed and made law, the measure would transform voter registration and voting in the U.S. It would require eligible voters to prove their citizenship with documents like a valid U.S. passport or a birth certificate and a valid photo ID. It's already illegal for non-U.S. citizens to vote in federal elections.

Trump said the legislation should "go to the front of the line." He also praised a guest on Fox News who pressed for changes to Senate rules that require 60 votes to advance most legislation. Trump has previously asked senators to abandon the filibuster in order to avoid the need for Democrats to back bills he favors.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has consistently pushed back on that pressure, saying any plans to change the filibuster do not have support in the GOP conference.

Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., reiterated that Democrats will not support the SAVE America Act.

"If Trump is saying he won't sign any bills until the SAVE Act is passed, then so be it: there will be total gridlock in the Senate," Schumer posted on X Sunday. "Senate Democrats will not help pass the SAVE Act under any circumstances."

The GOP-controlled House has passed a few versions of the legislation, but Democrats and some voting rights activists have argued the measure would make voting harder for eligible voters.

The impact of Trump's threat to withhold his signature on all bills remains unclear. If the House and Senate advance a bill and Congress remains in session, any bill would become law within 10 days even without a signature from Trump.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether Trump would sign a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security or a supplemental military package paying for the Iran war.

The offices of House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Thune did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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