The Brief

Each year more than 35,000 undocumented students with dreams of earning a college degree in California apply for the state’s marquee financial aid program, the Cal Grant — but only about a third receive it.

With no access to federal financial aid and few work opportunities, losing out on state dollars further undermines the ability of undocumented students to pay for school. The Cal Grant, for example, waives tuition at California’s public universities and provides cash awards of about $1,650 to community college students

Now, after several years of advocacy and a state law passed this year, California financial aid administrators are about to debut a revised application meant to get more college grants for undocumented students.

“What we all recognized was that we’ve asked these students to go through more processes, more forms, unfortunately to receive less financial aid,” said Jake Brymner, deputy director for policy and public affairs for the California Student Aid Commission. He and a commission staff member provided CalMatters with a virtual walkthrough of the new application.

The California Dream Act Application, often called CADAA, will for the first time allow students to also complete a frequently overlooked legal affidavit that’s essential to accessing state aid. The new application will debut by the end of December.

While a seemingly small change, it spares students from having to fill out two documents separately and at different times in the year, which has been the process ever since undocumented students became eligible for state aid through a 2011 state law. That has resulted in many students completing one form but not the other out of confusion or lack of awareness.

For example, among community college students, about 62,000 completed the affidavit but only around 25,000 finished the dream act application in 2021, according to data from the California Student Aid Commission, the state agency behind the application overhaul.

Without the application and affidavit, undocumented community college students can’t receive the Cal Grant and other related aid, such as a grant for full-time students and money in exchange for community service. Those three programs together provide more than $14,000 in possible grants annually. Undocumented students at public universities also lose out on key aid. Most undocumented college students in California attend a community college.

Now the legal affidavit will be embedded in the California Dream Act Application, the result of a 2023 state law created through Assembly Bill 1540, authored by Mike Fong, a Democrat from Monterey Park.

The changes should help students who are in a situation Leo Rodriguez was in when he began college. “When I first enrolled at a community college, I was billed $6,000 because I was incorrectly deemed an international student, a common occurrence for undocumented students,” he wrote in a May CalMatters commentary about affording college as an undocumented student. Though he attended and graduated from a California high school, he didn’t know that he needed the affidavit “to prove eligibility for in-state tuition, and to separately complete a Dream Act application to be considered for financial aid.”

A March report by the commission identified many of the hurdles undocumented students face in accessing state aid, including student confusion over the affidavit. All told, only about 14% of the state’s nearly 100,000 undocumented college students received any state financial aid in 2021-22, in large part because half didn’t take the first step to apply for aid even though many have low incomes. The report called for a state law to allow the affidavit to be a part of the dream act application. About half a year later, Fong’s bill was signed into law.

The affidavit in question stems from a 2001 law that has been amended several times since. It grants undocumented students, certain visa holders and other college-goers in-state tuition at California’s public universities and community colleges. This is a major perk because students deemed non-residents are charged about three times more in tuition. The in-state designation also makes undocumented students eligible for state grants, such as tuition waivers and cash awards.

That’s where the California Dream Act Application and the affidavit intersect: One opens the door for aid, the other lets the applicant walk through it.

Students who sign the affidavit declare that they’ve either filed an application to legalize their immigration status in the U.S. or will do so once national law creates such a pathway. It also has students confirm that they’ve had three years of K-12, adult school or community college education in California as well as: a high school diploma, an equivalent certificate, an associate degree or proof that they’ve taken the minimum set courses needed to transfer to a University of California or California State University campus.

FAFSA fact sheets are displayed at College Information Day at UC Berkeley in Berkeley on Oct. 14, 2023. Photo by Juliana Yamada for CalMatters

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Juliana Yamada

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CalMatters

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Embedding the affidavit in the dream act application is “going to be a big step forward”, but it’s not the only step needed “to ensure that students can receive all the financial aid for whatever they have eligibility for,” said Nancy Jodaitis, director of higher education issues at Immigrants Rising, a San Francisco-based project of a larger nonprofit.

Sending the affidavit to the schools the student hopes to attend is the first step, but all UCs and Cal States, and about half of community colleges, require official transcripts and attendance records from the student. How campuses will notify students with outstanding paperwork will be an ongoing issue to monitor, Jodaitis said.

Immigrants Rising in May published a comprehensive guide explaining the affidavit process in partnership with the state’s public colleges and universities. It’s now working on a set of recommendations for how campuses can best apprise students of the remaining paperwork they’ll have to submit once they’ve turned in their affidavit through the dream act. That’ll be published in January, she added.

In 2024, UC will ask students to submit the affidavits to the campuses directly, instead of through the dream act application, a spokesperson said. That’s because the UC is constitutionally independent of many state laws. Community colleges and Cal State have to comply with the law.

Advocates who focus on financial aid for undocumented students say that schools, state agencies and nonprofits that share with students information about college affordability should proactively include the dream act application and its related forms.

“I hardly saw financial aid workshops tailored for undocumented students in high school,” wrote Rodriguez. Instead, he mostly encountered information about the federal Free Application for Federal Student Aid, “which sent mixed messages about whether or not I was eligible for financial aid to begin with,” he added.

State law now requires that high school seniors complete a financial aid application, with few exceptions. The more school districts and nonprofits can stress the federal financial aid grant and the dream act application, the likelier undocumented students will hear the message and apply, Jodaitis said.

Information students place in the dream act application isn’t shared with the federal government nor with immigration authorities, the commission and state department of education stressed in a 2022 letter. That’s a message the commission will likely repeat in the face of a presidential election year in which anti-immigrant sentiment is bound to take center stage.

Students applying for the dream act who intend to enter college in fall 2024 will submit their household’s 2022 income information. Once the application goes live, students pursuing a four-year degree should complete the dream act forms by April 2 or sooner. Students planning to attend a community college have until early September to file their paperwork.

The 83rd annual Golden Globe Awards take place Sunday evening beginning at 5 p.m. at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, and that means parking restrictions and street closures in the city.

Here are places to avoid, as well as some alternative routes:

North Santa Monica Boulevard:

• Westbound lane closures: Complete lane closures, from Wilshire Boulevard to Century Park East through 6 a.m. Monday.
  
• Eastbound lane closures: Complete lane closures, from Century Park East to Wilshire Boulevard from 2 p.m. Saturday through 6 a.m. Monday. 

The city suggests using South Santa Monica Boulevard, which will remain open in both directions. There also are alternative east-west routes such as Olympic, Sunset and Pico boulevards.

Wilshire Boulevard:

• Eastbound/Westbound lane reduction: Lane reductions are in effect and will last through 9 p.m. Wednesday.
  
• Eastbound/Westbound full closure: All of Wilshire Boulevard between Comstock Avenue and North Santa Monica Boulevard will be closed from 10 p.m. Saturday through 6 a.m. Monday.
  
• Eastbound lanes of Wilshire Boulevard: An eastbound closure from Comstock to North Santa Monica Boulevard will occur between 10 p.m. Monday through 6 a.m. Tuesday.

Other streets:

Several other streets like Whittier Drive, Carmelita Avenue, Elevado Avenue and Lomitas Avenue, as well as Trenton Drive and adjacent alleys will have limited closures with local access available only to residents. Closures begin at 10 p.m. Saturday and last through 6 a.m. Monday.

Parking notices:

Residential streets surrounding the venue will be completely restricted, no exceptions made, from 6 a.m. Sunday until 6 a.m. Monday on the following streets:

• Whittier Drive — from Wilshire Boulevard to Elevado Avenue
• Carmelita Avenue — from Wilshire Boulevard to Walden Drive
• Elevado Avenue — from Wilshire Boulevard to Walden Drive
• Trenton Drive — from Whittier Drive to Wilshire Boulevard
• Walden Drive — from Santa Monica Boulevard to Elevado Avenue
• Lomitas Avenue — from Wilshire Boulevard to Walden Drive

Residents without permit parking can obtain parking exemptions by contacting the city of Beverly Hills’ parking exemption line at (310) 285-2548 or online at beverlyhills.org/parkingexemptions.

Demonstrations against this week’s deadly ICE shooting in Minneapolis are planned this weekend across Los Angeles. The protests are being organized by the “ICE Out For Good Coalition” — a network of several groups including the ACLU and 50501.

Here are a some of the planned actions across the city:

Saturday

• Pasadena: Noon to 2 p.m. at Garfield and Colorado Boulevard, across from the Paseo Mall
• Eagle Rock: 1 to 2 p.m. at Colorado and Eagle Rock boulevards
• City of Los Angeles: 2 to 4:30 p.m. in Pershing Square

Sunday

• West Hollywood: 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at 647 N. San Vicente Blvd., across from the Pacific Design Center.
• City of Los Angeles: Noon to 2 p.m. at The Home Depot on 2055 N. Figueroa St.
• Beverly Hills: 2 and 4 p.m. at 9439 Santa Monica Blvd., between Beverly and Canon drives

Jennifer Cacicio didn’t set out to move across the country.

Like thousands of others who fled the L.A. fires a year ago this week, Cacicio and her family left their Altadena home thinking they would be gone a night, maybe two.

But in the year since the Eaton Fire erased their house and neighborhood overnight, home has become somewhere entirely new.

Cacicio, a television writer, and her husband and 8-year-old daughter now live nearly 3,000 miles from L.A. — in Cold Spring, a village in New York’s Hudson Valley they’d never visited until this year.

Starting over somewhere completely new, Cacicio said, felt easier than rebuilding their lives in high-cost L.A. with the foothills of Altadena casting a long shadow.

“What we had in Altadena was so wonderful that anywhere else but Altadena feels like you're settling for less,” Cacicio said.

Jennifer Cacicio poses for a photo with her husband Matt Shallenberger and their daughter, Bruna.

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Matt Shallenberger

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Cacicio is part of a growing fire diaspora — Altadenans scattered across the country and the world, searching for versions of the natural beauty and close-knit and artistic community they enjoyed in the San Gabriels.

Cacicio said she knows of three other Altadena families who’ve relocated to the Hudson Valley. Neighborhoods still edge up against the wilderness, but wooded slopes and river cliffs now define the landscape for them where canyons and ridgelines once did.

I also spoke with two other Altadena households who left post-fire, one for the Netherlands and the other for Asheville, North Carolina. Each family described decisions shaped by financial realities and the wrenching calculus of raising young children after a fire.

From Altadena to the Netherlands

The Sporcks left the Netherlands for L.A. over seven years ago, setting off on their American adventure.

Joep, a film composer, saw career opportunities in L.A, and his wife Sarah, was eager to try life in a new country.

Friends in Altadena introduced them to the San Gabriels, and eventually they found their own house in the west part of Altadena near the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Joep composed film scores and trailer music in a converted garage and Sarah commuted to her job as an education specialist at a school in Lincoln Heights. Three years ago, they welcomed their first child.

In the back yard, they planted fruit trees and raised chickens, and hiked along trails to favorite spots like Millard Falls.

“We loved it, and we never meant to leave,” Joep said.

This time last year, Sarah was pregnant with their second son and had just finished her first trimester when on Jan. 7 the couple saw flames shooting from the foothills.

The fire came within several blocks, but their house was ultimately spared.

In the month after the fire, Joep worked to remediate their home alongside professional crews, as Sarah looked after their toddler, whose daycare, Altadena Children’s Center, had burned down.

“With Sarah pregnant, it was really scary, even afterwards,” Joep said.

Added Sarah: “And with a toddler that wants to play outside.”

As they prepared for their second child, the fire forced questions: How long would it take for Altadena to recover and what would that look like?

“I'm sure there will be a new Altadena in a couple of years,” Joep said. “But it felt like it wasn't going to be the same ever again.”

Once-vague thoughts moved to the foreground. In the Netherlands, they would have more family support and a stronger social safety net, like lower-cost childcare.

And Joep had reached a point in his career that he could work remotely.

This past summer, after their baby was born, a listing landed in Joep’s inbox for a three-story brick villa in the southern part of the Netherlands where Joep is from — hilly just like Altadena. The couple made an offer for the house in Epen without seeing it in person.

The Sporcks have moved back to the Netherlands, to the village of Epen in the southern part of the country.

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Gerlach Delissen

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“We made some lists like pros and cons of staying or leaving, and it was just we couldn't deny it anymore,” Joep said.

They put their house on the market — and after some price cuts — sold it to another Altadena family that had lost their home in the fire.

In November, the Sporcks moved to their Epen home, where they are still unpacking — and grieving.

“I’m really sad to be leaving America and Los Angeles,” Joep said. “It feels a little bit like giving up this dream.”

But he said the ties to the area are strong. Their children are dual-citizens. Joep will return to L.A. regularly for work.

“Part of us is now like American, Altadenan forever, I guess,” Joep said.

It's something, he said, that will always set them apart from their friends and family in the Netherlands.

From Eaton Canyon to the Blue Ridge Mountains

Altadena wasn’t their first stop in Southern California. There was Sherman Oaks and Highland Park.

But for Carson Dougherty and Chris Gower, their Altadena cottage rental within walking distance of Eaton Canyon was the first place that felt like home in L.A.

Pushing their daughters in strollers to Altadena Beverage and Market and Prime Pizza, they would stop to speak with neighbors along the way.

“I would walk around and just be like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe we live here,'" Carson said. “I've just never loved a place more or felt more welcome.”

Carson, a spiritual coach, had moved from New York to L.A. about nine years ago when she was an actor, accompanied by Chris who works in tech sales.

Carson is originally from northern Virginia, while Chris grew up in Surrey, England. The call of family always beckoned, but the allure of life in Altadena kept it at bay.

Carson Dougherty and her family moved to Asheville, North Carolina.

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Courtesy Carson Dougherty

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They had months earlier re-upped their lease for another two years, when the Eaton Fire happened.

The next day, they returned to find their rental standing — but coated in soot.

With no clear remediation plan being offered by the landlord and worried about their children’s health, the couple broke their lease and forfeited their full deposit.

As they planned their next move, Carson and Chris began rethinking what it meant to raise a family in California — from pre-school to housing.

“Life here is very hard,” Carson said. “We're obsessed with it, but it's not easy.”

Carson flew with the girls out to Virginia, and stayed with her parents. When Chris rejoined them, they discussed where they could live.

Using A.I., they researched cities within 500 miles of Carson’s parents that met their criteria for schools and property taxes. Starting with more than 50 places, Carson winnowed down the list by watching online walking tours of cities and asking for advice on social media.

Asheville, North Carolina — where she had once attended a wedding — kept coming up.

“But we were like, ‘We're not going to move to a place that just had a hurricane,” Carson said, recalling the devastation of Hurricane Helene in 2024.

After taking road trips to Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey and feeling nothing was clicking, the couple traveled to Asheville. They were drawn to the Blue Ridge Mountains that ring the city and the artistic community that reminded them of Altadena’s.

“I was like, ‘OK, this is it,’” Carson said. “I don't know. It was just a feeling.”

Two months into living in their current spot in Asheville, they’re still adjusting.

“I can see this was the right move for us,” Carson said. “But it doesn't feel like home yet.”

“It still feels like a consolation prize,” Chris said. “Whereas Altadena was the one that we were like ‘Holy crap, we found it.'"

Giving her daughter home

In Cold Spring, New York, Jennifer Cacicio is also going through a range of emotions.

“I love Altadena so much, and there's so much grief in letting go of it,” she said.

She mourns her street of identical mid-century homes designed by the architect Gregory Ain. When neighborhood kids visited each other, they knew the exact layout of each others’ homes.

Jennifer estimates of the 28 houses in the neighborhood, about three-quarters are gone.

After struggling with the cost of renting or buying in L.A., she and her husband — a landscape photographer — began thinking about moving East, where she’s from.

During their daughter’s spring break, the family flew out for an expedition.

“We tried to frame it with my daughter, like, ‘You know what this terrible thing happened, and we're going to try to turn it into a family adventure and live closer to cousins and explore a new part of the world,'" Jennifer said.

Jennifer Cacicio's 8-year-old daughter surveys her new environs in Cold Spring, N.Y.

They looked at towns within an hour or so of New York City, located in the suburbs of New York and Connecticut. In New York’s Hudson Valley, they visited an open house for a school that their daughter instantly took a shine to.

“We were like, ‘Great, let's just build it around that — like one thing felt right,’” Cacicio said.

Another sign came when Jennifer, who was the showrunner for this year’s Paramount+ drama Happy Face, got an offer to work on a show based in New York.

“It kind of felt like the universe confirming the decision in a way,” Jennifer said.

In September, they moved into their new home in Cold Spring. Cacicio puts aside her sadness when she thinks about her daughter.

After an event as traumatic as a fire, she wants her childhood to feel stable again. Altadena will recover over the next decade, Cacicio said, but later than she would hope for her daughter.

Being in a new place has brought unknowns, but also a sense of excitement.

"That was kind of what it came down to," Cacicio said. "It didn't feel like settling. It just felt different."

Los Angeles lost a piece of history when the Hollywood Center Motel burned down earlier this week.

The vacant property on Sunset Boulevard had a reputation as a sleazy, dilapidated inn, but the Hollywood Center Motel actually had multiple previous lives.

The building, one of the oldest in the neighborhood, was from a time before urbanization. It was also nominated for historic protection, in part because of its first era as a house.

A symbol of early Hollywood

Before the fire, the Hollywood Center Motel had seven buildings, a kidney-shaped pool, and a mid-century modern breeze block wall with a neon sign.

But the motel property actually started out as a three-story, Shingle-style home built in 1905, which is an American take on Victorian design known for broad gables.

That was built when Hollywood was an independent city, before it joined the city of L.A. Brian Curran, who co-chairs Hollywood Heritage’s preservation committee, says that during this period, Hollywood was known as a place for retirees to settle down.

“ [It was] marketed as a dry town,” he said. “So it was like, come in, retire among the orange groves and just enjoy life in sunny California.”

The Hollywood Center Motel in 1985.

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Ed Ruscha

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Courtesy Hollywood Heritage

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Hollywood was also changing from agricultural to real estate haven. If you were very well off, you’d live in a lavish Hollywood Hills estate, like Wattles Mansion. If you were more moderate, you’d live in the flat areas to the south, in upper-middle class homes just like the Shingle home.

Changing with the times

The home was first owned by William and Sarah Avery, according to Hollywood Heritage’s nomination petition, who called the home “El Nido” (the nest). They didn’t live there long, but the couple’s luncheon made it into the local paper.

The home changed hands multiple times. When Edmund Schultz, a retired drugstore owner, and his family bought the property in 1921, they decided to turn it into an old English bungalow court with over a dozen units around the main home. This was part of a shift in Hollywood to create low-scale apartments as people flocked to Southern California, according to city records.

“It physically evolved with the evolution of Hollywood,” Curran said, “but also tells a story about the economic and cultural evolution of Hollywood.”

The motel conversion didn’t happen until the mid-1950s, when a different owner enclosed the front porch and divided rooms. It was put up for auction as a 23-unit motel, with a full apartment and family-style spaces.

The Hollywood Center Motel opened shortly after in 1956. As TV’s popularity grew, it quickly became a backdrop for crime dramas. It’s been a filming location for Perry Mason, The Rockford Files, T.J. Hooker and L.A. Confidential. As the decades passed, its run-down appearance worked even better for those who wanted a seedy setting.

A still of the motel in the TV cop drama "T.J. Hooker." The episode, titled "Sweet Sixteen...and Dead," aired in February 1983.

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Screenshot via Tubi

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The damaged neon sign in 2024.

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Darya Sannikova

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Pexels

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The music industry also got a piece of it. In the 70s, musician Neil Young stayed there because he wanted to sleep in the “sleaziest motel” on Sunset Boulevard.

This was the Hollywood Center Motel’s life for decades — a little bit of stardom while it slowly deteriorated. In 2015, the breeze block was damaged in a car crash and not repaired, according to the nomination petition. The motel stopped operating three years later.

What the fire means for historic status

Only a handful of buildings in Hollywood have this kind of history, which is why Curran says they began fighting for it to be protected once it became vacant last year.

The site was eligible for local and state historic status. The city of L.A.’s Cultural Heritage Commission had just voted a few weeks ago to consider that.

But they couldn’t stay ahead of issues. The home was vandalized. A small blaze broke out on the second floor in September. Another fire damaged one of the bungalows the following month.

The home was demolished in the process of stopping the flames.

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Courtesy Hollywood Heritage

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Curran says losing the home in this last fire— the most significant element of the complex — makes the nomination process more challenging, but they’re still pushing for it. He wants protections for the neon sign and breeze block wall. Moving forward, Curran says Hollywood Heritage  will be talking with policymakers about preventing other important sites from the same fate.

“ We know from experience that when you don’t use a building, when there aren’t people inside, they are vulnerable and then they burn,” Curran said. “ We need to do something because this continues to happen.”