The Brief

After years of pandemic declines, enrollment at California’s community colleges may finally be starting to rebound in a significant way.

Several colleges across the state, from San Diego to San Jose, are reporting that their enrollments are up by double digit percentages this fall. Statewide data for the fall isn’t yet available, but enrollment in the spring was up 8% across the system of 116 colleges, according to a memo prepared by the state chancellor’s office.

College officials cited the expansion of dual enrollment and more interest in career-focused programs as being among the main drivers of the enrollment growth.

“In conversations with CEOs for fall 2023, I’m hearing good news, positive trends. And in fact, many of the districts are telling me that they’re seeing double-digit enrollment growth,” Sonya Christian, the statewide chancellor for the system, told the system’s board of governors Tuesday.

Given that, the memo prepared by the chancellor’s office says the system now has “a meaningful positive enrollment outlook for the first time in over five years.”

Still, enrollment across the system as of the spring was down 16% compared to pre-pandemic levels. And although the colleges are seeing big increases in dual enrollment and more enrollments from some older students, other students have not returned. Among students between the ages of 20 and 24, enrollment was down 27% as of the spring compared with pre-COVID levels. It was also down 22% among students between the ages of 25 and 34.

Christian’s goal for the colleges, outlined in her official Vision 2030 plan for the system, is to increase enrollment to greater than pre-pandemic levels by 2030. The board of governors voted Tuesday to begin formally implementing that vision. Among other goals, her plan calls to enroll more low-income adults, who she says have been historically left behind by the system. She also wants colleges to further expand dual enrollment by having every high school student taking a college class.

Breaking down the growth

Dual enrollment has already been growing steadily across the state. In spring 2023, enrollment among students ages 19 and younger was up 14% compared with spring 2022, an increase that was largely aided by growth in dual enrollment programs. As of the spring, students in that age group had surpassed their pre-pandemic enrollment levels, making them the only age group to do so.

At the San Jose Evergreen Community College District, enrollment this fall is up by about 15% compared with a year ago, and the largest increases are among students aged 17 or younger, thanks to dual enrollment expansions. The district has specifically focused on expanding partnerships with high schools in East San Jose to enroll underserved high schoolers in that area, said Beatriz Chaidez, the district’s interim chancellor, in an interview.

“People see the value in community colleges, and that’s creating the increased interest, and we’re casting a wider net with our K-12 partners,” Chaidez added.

Career-oriented

Colleges are also reporting growth in career training and skill-based programs. At Mt. San Jacinto College in Riverside County, where enrollment is up 13% compared with last fall, “there is a notable trend of students gravitating more towards career-focused educational paths,” said Brandon Moore, the college’s vice president of enrollment management, in an email.

Moore said there has been a “significant uptick” in enrollment in the college’s automotive and computer information systems programs. “Furthermore, budding programs such as culinary arts are also carving a niche, reflecting a growing interest in specialized skill-based education,” he added.

The San Diego Community College District, where enrollment is up by 14% this fall but still well below pre-pandemic levels, is similarly seeing increased demand for career training programs, said Ashanti Hands, president of San Diego Mesa College. That’s specifically the case for short-term certificate programs in subjects such as accounting, biotechnology and cybersecurity.

“These are students who want to come and really focus on being able to find work,” Hands said. “They can do that within a short amount of time. It’s the immediate return on their investment.”

Reaching out

Christian, who became statewide chancellor in June, wants to connect even more students to the workforce by targeting the state’s adults who have graduated from high school but don’t have a postsecondary degree. According to her office, there are 6.8 million of them in California between the ages of 25 and 54, and those individuals are disproportionately likely to be low-income and struggling to find well-paid work.

Under Christian’s Vision 2030, the colleges would enroll many of those individuals and help connect them to good jobs. The Vision 2030 planning document notes that if the colleges enrolled 5% of those individuals, it would generate 300,000 new students across the system. During the 2022-23 academic year, the system enrolled about 1.92 million students, down by more than 300,000 compared with pre-pandemic levels.

“Vision 2030 asks the fundamental question: Why have we not yet reached these individuals? When students cannot find their way to college, it is our responsibility to bring college to them,” Christian said.

Hands, the Mesa College president, said she’s confident that community colleges across the state, including the San Diego colleges, will be able to fully recover the enrollment they lost during the pandemic. But she added that, as those increases happen in areas like dual enrollment and workforce programs, the colleges won’t look the same as they did before the pandemic.

“We are not there yet, but the way that we are moving, I have no doubt that we will get back to those numbers,” she said. “But it won’t be business as usual because I think we’re going to need to be mindful that we may be seeing different students, a different group of students.”

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.”

Sorry, folks. The bluefin tuna that's worth the price of a decent Hollywood Hills home is now sold out in L.A.

What, you say?

It all started with an age-old tradition

Every Jan. 5, the world's largest wholesale seafood market in Tokyo holds a special auction to ring in the new year.

This week, a 535-pound bluefin tuna was sold at Toyosu Fish Market for a record-setting 510.3 million yen — or around $3.2 million in U.S. dollars. That's about $6,000 a pound.

The winning bidder was Kiyoshi Kimura — the country's titular "Tuna King" who operates the Sushi Zanmai chain of restaurants in Japan that’s known for its quality but affordable sushi.

So what does it have to do with L.A.

After the auction, about 30 pounds of that hunk of a tuna was flown to the chain's only stateside outpost at Chapman Plaza in Koreatown.

"One of the staff from headquarters brought it by plane," said Tiger Nakawake, the general manager of Sushi Zanmai LA. He added that the fish was kept fresh with temperature control packaging and ice.

Nakawake said that the L.A. location always gets their bluefin from its Tokyo mothership. The other fish they get from companies in Japan and locally.

For him, there's a lot of pride that this New Year symbol of good fortune and tradition has come to this neck of the woods.

"All the staff were super happy, because we're the only restaurant in the United States who has 'World Record Blue Fin Tuna,'” Nakawake said in an email.

The giant bluefin that's worth $3.2 million.

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Courtesy Tiger Nakawake

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What makes bluefin special is its "sweetness and acidity" that is both "refined and perfectly balanced," he added.

But the 535-pound giant is next league.

"Truly the most elegant and delicious tuna I have ever tasted in the last 50 years," he said.

While supply lasts

Nakawake estimated their share yielded about 1,000 sushi slices, which the restaurant started serving Thursday. In keeping with the chain's mission to offer good sushi without breaking the bank, Zanmai L.A. is keeping prices low — from $4 to $7 a piece, depending on the cut.

"This tuna is a New Year gift and appreciation to all the people in L.A. from Tuna King," Nakawake said.

The limit was one piece per person. Late last night, Nakawake updated LAist to say that the fish was, "unfortunately, all sold out."

But not to worry, this isn't the Tuna King's first rodeo at going big at the annual new year's auction. According to the BBC, Kimura also submitted historic winning bids in 2012, 2013, and 2019.

So yes, there's always next year.