The Brief

The Los Angeles Community College District hosted a series of town halls this month to discuss building student housing on three campuses in the district — L.A. City College in East Hollywood, Pierce in Woodland Hills, and West L.A. in Culver City.

Community college students today won’t likely benefit from the proposed housing. According to Rod Hamilton, a regional director for the district’s construction program Build LACCD, at an expedited timeline the projects could be complete by the end of 2028. The town halls will inform the district’s request for proposals, which representatives expect to issue at the beginning of 2024. They also cautioned that much is still tentative — even the identified sites.

There is no question that the student demand for housing is high. Based in a spring 2022 survey of LACCD students, 14% of the respondents indicated they don’t have housing or their housing is insecure. As a percentage of LACCD’s fall 2023 headcount, that’d be about 17,000 students.

“This is the beginning,” said Sara Hernandez, a member of the board of trustees, speaking at L.A. City College. “I know housing, housing insecurity, homelessness is not the beginning here in Los Angeles. This has been going on for a long time, but this is the beginning of the district's efforts around housing because we now have the money.”

That money comes from last year’s voter-approved $5.3-billion bond, known as Measure L.A., which allocated $500 million to house the district’s students and workers. Up to three projects will be chosen, each to provide between 300 to 400 beds.

Housing as an expectation of community colleges

Hernandez said these events are important to hear community needs and build a coalition of support for these housing efforts.

LACCD joins a growing number of California community colleges developing housing on their campuses. Colleges in the Central Valley have a longer history of on-campus housing, but LACCD and other districts are catching up.

One of the latest in the region has been Orange Coast College, offering slightly more than 800 beds in 2020. LACCD presenters point out that what makes this district distinct from its Southern California counterpart is that the units will be affordable at $500 per month per bed.

A student walks at Pierce College.

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In its May 2023 housing resolution, LACCD affirmed its commitment to address student, faculty, and staff housing needs.

Despite this formal announcement, the realm of developing housing is still an area of growth for the district.

“It's challenging because, you know, we are in the industry of educating students. We are not a housing provider. You know, this is our first foray into the world of housing development,“ Hernandez said.

“It is really, really clear that, you know, this is a societal issue that has, you know, really made living in Los Angeles really, really difficult for young people, and we need to do more," she added. "And that's why we are really excited and motivated to link arms with the mayor, to link arms with the county, and be a part of the solution to this ongoing, regional wide housing crisis and homelessness crisis.”

Offering solutions

Participants at the town halls were not short of ideas for improving housing security.

At L.A. City College, the room was so packed that a few attendees gathered outside the open door. The energy in the room was tense, with a number of participants frustrated by the wait and wary of potential waste.

One suggested partnering with the University of California and California State University systems to provide housing stability to students transferring to the four-year degree programs. At the West L.A. town hall, Rueben Smith, the vice chancellor and chief facilities executive, said that LACCD is looking to partner with universities with existing housing inventory and work with the city of L.A. and the county to increase housing inventory.

One student worker at the LACC town hall, who said that she is $20,000 in debt from rental costs, suggested raising student worker wages so that they can afford rent and stay committed to their academics.

LACC student Reginald Johnson II told LAist he was a theater major and has been unhoused since the COVID-19 pandemic started. Before the pandemic he had been staying at the Union Rescue Mission, but being in close proximity with so many other people, without partitions, he was worried about getting sick. He said it was a “very hard choice” to return to street living, where he had previously been robbed.

Reginald Johnson II who is studying to become a stage manager prepares for a theatre program rehearsal at Los Angeles City College.

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Among various ideas, he offered that those in the creative industry may be willing to donate toward housing students if their needs were more publicized, particularly at a campus like LACC, where students are pursuing careers in music, cinema, and theater. Another idea he offered is acquiring neighboring vacant motels and providing jobs for students who are studying property management in their degree program.

“We need to come up with solutions now so the students don't have housing insecurities to deal with and worry about right now,” Johnson II said. As a gay man and a person of color, Johnson II told LAist, he wants to be a voice for students or those afraid to speak up.

He appreciated LACCD’s plan to build new housing, but considered it a piecemeal approach to the larger problem. “So let's just try to figure out what other solutions and avenues that we can look at to provide solutions,” he said.

Students call for immediate housing and support  

One participant, who has worked in residential real estate, said that these projects can take a decade, and recommended alternatives to building housing, such as purchasing from neighboring landowners. Hernandez noted later the risk of displacing residents.

The bureaucratic logistics caused frustration.

“Students are being robbed of their capacity to learn because they're too worried about just keeping a roof over their head,” said Jordan David, who is studying political science and is president of the organization Student Power. The organization also called for immediate housing solutions, post-graduation housing support, and student oversight in the planning process.

Reginald Johnson II sleeps on the Metro B line on his was into school at Los Angeles City College.

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One student, who has been homeless while at LACC, asked if the student housing could be accompanied with supportive services. “Because a lot of the students you're going to bring in are probably experiencing homelessness, housing insecurity, trauma from their communities. Because we also have to acknowledge that a lot of homelessness is birthed in racism and prejudiced practices. And so there are specific communities that you're really going to have to support because of that,” the student said to echoes of agreement from others.

Smith, the chief facilities executive, said housing policies are still being developed and LACCD will seek further input as part of its shared governance process.

One law faculty member, Camille Goulet, whose e-mail comments were read by another, also asked for funding to be budgeted for support services, like health and wellness and security, and raised concerns about the risk of people enrolling as students for housing without sincere academic intentions.

Speaking later to LAist, trustee Hernandez said, “You can hear the frustration in the voices of students that, you know, their needs are not being served. As an educator, like, I know very well that we can't serve students, we can't help them attain their educational goals if they don't have their basic needs. And so we are doing everything that we can at the district to provide for that.”

Many students need housing, but who will get it? 

Participants at Pierce were concerned about who would be eligible for the future housing.

The presenters said that the selection criteria were still to be determined, but were planning for an initial phase:

• Single students (with plans later to account for families and workers)
• Full-time students
• Those with a minimum 2.0 GPA

Pierce participants expressed concern about the confines of this criteria — what about students with families that need housing, can this topic be revisited? Do you really need to be a full-time student? What if $500 a month is still too expensive? And what is the consequence if a student’s GPA falls below 2.0 because of a job’s demanding hours or a mental health crisis — will they just get kicked out?

When asked by LAist how to prioritize the students, one of the participants, sociology professor James McKeever, said: “We need to look at our foster youth, we need to look at our homeless students, our housing insecure students, those who come from low income backgrounds first, because we're not going to have enough housing for everybody at this cost.”

The stress of housing insecurity

Jessica McCready, a cinema and television student who has previously been unhoused, attended the LACC town hall to learn about what was going on. While she appreciated the efforts to build housing — at this town hall, an eight-year timeframe was mentioned — she said she wants to see another convening to address more immediate needs.

“We had this meeting and we're talking about what's going to happen in eight years, but now, OK, let's have another and talk about maybe what's going to happen in six months to a year," she said. "I feel like that's a really, really useful, use of time. I think that's where we need to start.”

Rachel Alberto-Gomez is a deaf studies student at the Pierce town hall, whose health professor encouraged students to attend. In that class, the students discussed the relationship between mental health and housing.

Alberto-Gomez said they talked about “the stress of housing, how it causes us to be overwhelmed, not be able to perform, and to get the necessary education that we want.”

Alberto-Gomez hopes that future housing will offer sufficient security for students. She told LAist security is important to her from her experience as a woman walking alone to her car at night or waiting for the bus in the morning, which can feel scary and unsafe.

She knows quite a few students sleeping in their cars and appreciates that Pierce College has opened up its parking lot to unhoused students. She says housing is important for these students, but also for everybody, including herself.

“Luckily, right now, I'm OK, but in the future ... I don't know what the future holds,” Alberto-Gomez said. Currently, she depends on her partner for housing and her family lives far away. “And especially with, right now, as prices are increasing, housing is also increasing. So this program would really help us.”

Topline:

Street flooding: Roadway flooding was reported this morning on the westbound 134 Freeway at the 5, near Glendale and Griffith Park.

Coastal Flooding: All weekend, forecasters have warned of dangerous rip currents and an elevated risk of coastal flooding.

Flooding was reported yesterday in Seal Beach and Long Beach.

"We have quite a few reports already of waves up to 10 feet on some beaches — Zuma Beach especially, where we've gotten reports [of] strong rip currents," said Todd Hall, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Advisories and closures:

• An ocean water quality rain advisory has been issued for all L.A. County beaches until Wednesday, Sept. 9 at 2 p.m. That means to avoid ocean water contact for at least 72 hours after the rain.
• A coastal flood advisory and a high surf advisory for L.A. and Ventura county beaches remain in effect until Tuesday, Sept. 8 at 11 p.m.
• The City of Seal Beach is closing two beach parking lots due to flooding concerns.

What's next: Hall said to expect more showers across L.A. County throughout Sunday. On Monday, he said isolated rain is expected, mostly in the mountains.

A sign on the front door says “Beekeeper owned,” and inside the Hive & Hanger store in Burbank, the layout is a mix of vintage clothes, antique jewelry and something rather unexpected: a pop-up Bee Museum.

The owner is Carrie Diazzz, a vintage maven turned urban apiarist. She admits with a smile  two extra Zs at the end of her real last name are a homage to her beloved bees.

When the store opened in 2020, it was originally all-vintage. “I was not looking to change careers,” she said, but after taking a two-hour beekeeping experience course, she was hooked.

Hive & Hangar in Burbank doubles as a bee museum.

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“I don’t like dirt, and I don't like bugs. I'm a heels and lipstick, nails, kind of person,” she said. “There's just something magical about the honeybee. The more you know, the more you want to know.”

That prompted her to pursue a bee master certification at UC Davis. She collaborated with Elina Niño at the university’s Bee Lab to curate information and research to bring her pop-up Bee Museum to life almost a year ago.

A crash course in bees

The Burbank Bee Museum.

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There’s a Bee 101 explainer by the front door, which shows the differences between bees and wasps, and fun touches like pop songs containing the word “Honey,” and a list of Noteworthy Beekeepers including Aristotle, Benjamin Franklin, Leo Tolstoy, Emily Dickinson, Angelina Jolie and Sherlock Holmes.

One long-standing myth is that honeybees are stingers. “People always ask me how often I get stung, but I don’t wear gloves, and I don’t use smoke, and it very rarely happens. And honeybees die after they sting, as opposed to wasps, who can sting repeatedly,” she said.

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Most arresting is a floor-to-ceiling collage series of framed model fruits, vegetables, nuts and berries, all of which the honeybee has a role in pollinating. Beside that is an exhibit on pesticides, one of the insect's biggest threats. Pieces of dried honeycomb are everywhere.

Diazzz has also been hosting school trips for the Boys & Girls Clubs. “I might be the only beekeeper they will ever meet,” she noted. The point is to give bees the respect they deserve. “Did you know that it takes 12 honeybees their entire lives to make one teaspoon of honey?”

Rescuing hives across Southern California

The Bee Museum serves up not just honey, but bee knowledge.

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There are no live bees in the store, but Diazzz has her own hives in Burbank.

“They are from rescues: I cut the hive out from a wall,” she explained. She takes care of hives from San Diego to Bel Air, with many in the San Fernando Valley, and a couple with a view of the Hollywood Sign. Her caretaking quests have taken her on skyscraper roofs, at apartment buildings and in parking lots.

Almost a year ago, she began her studies as a honey sommelier at the American Honey Tasting Society in Connecticut, where she learned about the science and experience of honey. Her future includes going off to Bologna, Italy, the world honey hub, for the final round of studies and tests at the Albo Nazionale degli Esperti in Analisi Sensoriale del Miele or the National Register of Experts in Sensory Analysis of Honey.

Carrie Diazzz, owner of the store and the museum, sells small jars of honey sourced locally and from her own hives.

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“Nectar and honey are not the same thing,” she explained. “Nectar is the liquid sticky substance that bees collect from flowering plants and take back to the hive. They transform it into honey by dehydrating the moisture out of the nectar, and capping it over with wax.”

Diazzz recently held her first informal tasting experience at The Bee Museum, and has small batches of various local honeys for sale: cactus, sage, and honey from her own hives. “I usually leave the honey alone, and only take any extra they have made to sell,” she said, because bees use the honey as sustenance. Her favorite? “A toss-up between dandelion and sunflower. Orange blossom is delicious too, but very sweet.”

Maybe you, like me, are a daily puzzle player. Maybe you like a Wordle, or a crossword, or one of the other entries from the New York Times puzzle empire.

But maybe you're looking for something else.

So, with a tip of the hat to the people on Bluesky who helped me discover a bunch of games I love in the last month or two, I'm sharing a few games that I'm particularly enjoying these days — ones that are not NYT word games. (No disrespect to my original love, Spelling Bee.)

There are more, of course: the spelling bee game Beeswax, the word game Smush, the vexing Anthropeum, the movie games Framed and Cinematrix. Truthfully, I have more games in the "daily games" folder on my phone than I could ever actually play daily. But given a choice between puzzling and doomscrolling, I'll take the puzzles every time.

MapTap

Any idea where Regina is? Do your best in MapTap's daily geography game.

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MapTap is a very simple game. You are shown a 3D globe that you can rotate with your finger, but there are no lines dividing countries or territories. So you are just looking at the unmarked terrain of the world, and you are challenged to tap as close as you can to a particular named location. Maybe "London, England, U.K." You tap. It shows you the distance between where you tapped and where the place really is. You get more points the closer you are. There are five questions in each daily round.

This game can be genuinely humbling, because without those familiar borders showing, it can be difficult to even locate places you are very familiar with. (Without state and national boundaries, it always takes me a minute to precisely find even a place I myself have lived.) But what I love about MapTap is that as I do it, over and over, I actually get better at world geography, which is worthwhile and enriching.

TimeGuessr

Look carefully: What's your best guess for where and when this photo was taken? TimeGuessr makes you a detective.

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In the same family as MapTap is TimeGuessr, where each day's challenge is made up of five puzzles that each start with a photo. Your task is to choose, on a timeline, what year the photo was taken, and to choose, on a map of the world, where it was taken. Sometimes, the photos are of historically meaningful events, like the aftermath of a battle or a natural disaster. Sometimes, they are photographs of ordinary people going about their lives.

The trick with TimeGuessr is detective work. Some hints are straightforward: a sign in the window of a store that might tip off the location (if you can figure out what language it's written in), a license plate, something along those lines. But sometimes, the clues are more subtle. What are the people in the photo wearing? What do the cars look like? How is everybody wearing their hair? It's a fascinating exercise in putting together clues, and again, you can actually increase your knowledge of the world while you play.

The Loop

Everything is connected (somehow) in The Loop, which is a perfect first-thing-when-you-wake-up game.

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The Loop is my favorite early-morning game, perfect for when I'm only partially awake. It offers you 12 simple illustrations that you have to arrange in a circle so that each illustration connects in some way to the ones on either side of it.

So, for instance, in one round I played, a square-root symbol connected on one side to a carpenter's square (because square/square), which then connected to a picture of a toolbox (because a carpenter's square is a tool). On the other side, the square-root symbol connected to a carrot (because it's a root vegetable), and then the carrot to an icicle (because they're the same shape). It can be fun to crack all the different ways that the images connect to each other, but the game design also offers so many chances to get it right that there's a huge amount of grace for making mistakes. That, of course, is why it's perfect for being half-awake.

Clues by Sam

It's up to you to figure out who's innocent and who's guilty in Clues by Sam.

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Clues by Sam is a logic puzzle. It presents you with a grid — four across and five down — of people, each represented by a name, an emoji and an occupation. Your job is to figure out which of those people are innocent and which are criminals. (There is no set number; there could be lots of criminals or only a couple.) Your opening clue might say, "Michael is one of three criminals in row 2." Then you click on Michael and mark him as a criminal, and when you're right, that gets you another clue, and so on.

Like most of these games, this one is enjoyable largely because it's simple, but its diabolical twist is that you can't guess. If you try to label Jane innocent, for instance, and she eventually will be, but the game hasn't given you enough information yet to actually know that, then that answer is wrong and is rejected. You are only allowed to deduce from the clues you have, because it is genuinely the journey and not the destination. Note that Clues by Sam gets harder each day from Monday through Sunday, so if you're a beginner, give it a whirl early in the week to get the hang of it.

Catfishing

Catfishing asks you to figure out the title of a Wikipedia page from its categories — which is harder than it sounds.

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Without a doubt, the hardest game I play regularly. In this game, you get a list of at least some of the categories that a particular Wikipedia page belongs to, and you have to try to figure out what page it is. There are ten questions; my average score is about four, and the highest I've ever gotten is eight.

For example, if you know a page is filed under "20th century musicians," and "21st century musicians," and "American folk musicians," and "people born in Minnesota," you might start to zero in on Bob Dylan. But be warned: Many of the answers are far more obscure than that, and it's very common for me to give up and reveal the answer, only to learn that I never stood a chance, because I've never heard of the person (or event, or phenomenon) at all. It doesn't matter how many ways you classify certain medieval rulers or political conflicts of 19th century Iowa; I may never get there.

This piece also appeared in NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what's making us happy.

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