‘Gimme Shelter’: California’s housing crisis forces college students into homelessness

Matthew Chin is a third-year environmental studies student at UC Santa Cruz. Because housing near campus is so expensive, he lives in a used trailer that he parks in a driveway — a driveway he rents for $750 a month. Chin’s precarious living situation is far from unique among college students across the state. One in five California community college students, one in 10 California State University students and one in 20 University of California students are homeless, a recent UCLA study found.