What timeline are we living in that this even has to be a thing?

Living situations for a large enough population will have statistical outliers. The students may not have the means of paying room and board.

From the article:

“A UCLA study published late last year found that 1 in 5 California Community College students, 1 in 10 California State University students and 1 in 20 UC University of California students were experiencing homelessness.”

http://transformschools.ucla.edu/stateofcrisis/

Maybe someone else will have more luck than me but this seems kinda odd. The linked UCLA study didn't find those things directly. It's just (mis?)quoting other studies.

For example, the stat about "1 in 5 community college students" is attributed to "Wood, J. L., Harris III, F., & Delgado, N. R. (2016). Struggling to survive—Striving to succeed: Food and housing insecurities in community college." From reading their paper, Wood & friends didn't actually find that 20% of community college students were homeless. They found that 1/3 of students had at some point experienced housing insecurity, which is a superset of homelessness. I have no idea where the 1 in 5 stat comes from. The paper says 32.3%, which includes students who are not just homeless but also subjected to "Unfordable (sic) housing, poor housing quality, crowding, and frequent moves". These things are obviously bad, but still way better than being homeless- it seems misleading to lump them together (unless I'm missing something?)

Yeah it’s pretty shocking that ~20% of community college students are some kind of homeless. And particularly shameful when contrasted with the stock market continually hitting all time highs. Not really sure who society is for anymore.

It's the logical end-result of neoliberalism and putting The Market (swt) on a pedestal as an end goal in itself, rather than a tool and a means to prosperity.

1 in 20 UC students is really high. UCSD has 31k undergraduate students, and that would mean around 1500 homeless students just at one campus?

I wonder if this is a side effect of the high tuition even for in-state students.

Edit: correct number of homeless students.

The study cited says 5% of UC students are homeless vs 20% at the city colleges, so UCSD would be about 1550 students which is still insane.

Thanks for correcting math. :)

Also with a large population folks will sometimes be temporary homeless due to disagreements between folks cohabitating

It's interesting that every university can theoretically bypass NIMBYs with dorms, yet they can't bypass other social factors where perfect is the enemy of good (or adequate or at least not fully negligent inaction) so they also tend to end up with inaction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29038356

“This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.”

So hard at work... for years...