Griffith, 20, is a former foster youth. She moved from the Sacramento area to Quincy in order to follow her dream of running a dude ranch. Feather River College is the only school in the state to offer a bachelor’s degree program in equine and ranch management.
The campus includes horse stables, a fish hatchery and other nods to the Plumas County economy, which relies heavily on logging and outdoor recreation. To meet the needs of students like Robinson and Griffith, the college has multiple dormitories with a total capacity of about 260 students. Unlike the rest of campus, where buildings are carefully designed to blend with the surrounding forest, most of the dorms are purely utilitarian. The buildings are bare, white rectangles, except for a few hints of student life. Cowboy boots and spurs sit outside many doorways; a dirt trail connects the dormitories to class.
Rent is around $500 a month, including utilities. Signups for the upcoming fall semester opened on Feb. 3, but two days later, registration was already full, said Kevin Trutna, the college president. By putting three beds in a single room, the college can house over 300 people, but even then, there’s a waitlist. This semester, he said over 80 students failed to get a campus housing spot.
“As a former foster youth, it’s sink or swim,” said Griffith, who received one of the coveted housing spots in a bedroom she shares with an equine studies major. “Anything I get, I had to fight for.”
By combining four different state and federal grants, plus a private scholarship, she receives more than $20,000 this year in financial aid, which is more than enough to cover the monthly rent. The housing is a significant upgrade, she said, especially compared to her foster home and the previous “free” housing arrangement.
Robinson wasn’t interested in living in a shared dormitory, which is the only campus housing available, so he found a mobile home off-campus this semester.
“I didn’t feel like I had a choice but to accept the one place that I had found, even though it wasn’t ideal,” he said.
After moving in, he spent hours shampooing the carpets and cleaning up his unit to make it livable, but he said he’s still worried it may be unsafe because of lingering mold and lack of ventilation for the stove. He pays $850 a month, but the landlord wants to move in at the end of April, so he’ll need to find a new place soon.
Finding housing alternatives through RV parks and bond dollars
After Trutna realized the state was unlikely to fund the Feather River College’s next housing development, he called Dayne Lewis, the owner of a local RV park that abuts the campus, to see if the park had additional capacity. Out of the park’s 31 RVs, Lewis said roughly half are students.
“I would fill this place completely with students but the timing doesn’t always work out,” he said. Since the Dixie and North Complex fires tore through Plumas County, many state and federal contractors have moved to Quincy, the largest city in the county, to work on rebuilding the region. Those contractors now compete with students for temporary housing, he said.
Antelope Valley College in Lancaster purchased a $9 million plot of land for its proposed housing project, but it now sits empty since state funding fell through, said Jennifer Zellet, the college president. Like administrators at Ohlone College and Santa Monica College, Zellet said she’s exploring a “public-private partnership,” in which a local nonprofit builds and operates a housing development on that land using a portion of regional bond dollars.
These partnerships are a popular but imperfect solution. In Long Beach, where the community college proposed building over 240 units, President Mike Muñoz said he won’t resort to a public-private partnership. Because housing would be run by a private entity, not a college, he said it’s common for these kinds of projects to charge students higher rent. Instead, he said the college plans to rely entirely on local bond dollars, even if that means delays on other campus projects that need bond money, such as a new training center for police officers and firefighters.
Rural parts of the state, such as Plumas and Mendocino counties, have fewer alternatives. The projects are often smaller since there are fewer residents, and as a result, the profit margins are thin, said Mendocino College President Timothy Karas. Both Trutna, the president of Feather River College, and Karas say that they have no bond dollars available.