Empty dorm hailed as perfect ruin while Palmdale commuter whispers encouragement to a mattress named Gerald
LOS ANGELES — Cal State LA’s discovery that hundreds of its dormitory beds sit empty while its students sleep in cars, on couches, and in what one sophomore described as “a converted closet with main-character energy” has been hailed by housing officials as a breakthrough, marking the first time Los Angeles has successfully built housing and withheld it in the same building.
The paradox, uncovered in LAist’s investigation, finds the university system’s own housing plan citing a need for roughly 500 beds at the campus while existing beds go unused, an achievement the region’s housing bureaucracy has studied with the reverence of engineers examining a perpetual motion machine.
The Achievement Explained
“Understand what has been accomplished here,” said Dr. Winslow Barragan-Ochoa of the Southern California Institute for Housing Almostness. “The hard part of housing is building it. The permits, the lawsuits, the neighbor who claims the shadow of a dormitory will kill his lemon tree. That war takes decades. This campus already won it. The beds exist. They have frames. They have those mattresses with the vinyl covers that sound like applause when you roll over. All that remained was the final step, the putting of a student in the bed, and it is precisely there, at the one-yard line, that the system chose to kneel. It is the most Los Angeles ending possible. We built the thing and then could not afford to use the thing we built to solve the problem we built it for.”
Barragan-Ochoa noted that the empty beds now join the region’s distinguished collection of adjacent solutions, including the transit lines that stop short of the airport for thirty years, the reservoirs of shade unbuilt at bus stops, and the many affordable units that are affordable pending a definition.
The Students Adapt
Students, meanwhile, continue navigating a housing market that treats them as a rounding error with a meal plan. “I commute two hours each way from Palmdale,” said junior kinesiology major Destiny Okafor-Ruiz, 21, interviewed during hour one of the return leg. “I have a 7 a.m. class. I wake up at 4:30. There is a building on my campus, that I can see from my classroom, containing a bed, that is empty, that I am not in. I think about that bed during lecture. I have named the bed. The bed’s name is Gerald. Gerald and I have never met, but I know he is up there, unused, with his vinyl applause, and some nights on the 14 freeway I whisper, hold on, Gerald. Neither of us knows what we are waiting for. Paperwork, probably.”
Other students have developed workarounds of local ingenuity, including a rotating couch federation spanning three apartments, a senior who has quietly lived in the library at a level of stealth the administration describes as “honestly impressive,” and a parking lot community whose members refer to their cars by unit numbers and have elected an HOA president, a 2011 Corolla, on a platform of quiet hours. The Corolla ran unopposed after the incumbent, a Dodge Caravan, was towed mid-term in what residents describe as the lot’s first coup, and its first interaction with campus parking enforcement that anyone would call responsive.
Administrative Response
University officials attribute the vacancy to a lattice of factors including cost, since dorm rates were set against a market that assumes students photosynthesize, awareness gaps, and eligibility processes that one internal reviewer compared to “applying for a mortgage to take a nap.” A task force has been convened, and its first act was to schedule a retreat, off campus, at a facility with lodging.
“We take this seriously,” said a spokesperson, standing in front of the residence hall, which loomed behind her with the serene fullness of an unopened water bottle at a marathon. “We are streamlining the application, reviewing our rates, and exploring a pilot in which a student who needs a bed is given the bed. The pilot is bold. The pilot has skeptics. But we believe that with sufficient study, a bed and a tired person can be brought together, here, in our lifetime.”
Regional Significance
Housing advocates say the episode distills the entire Southern California crisis into a single dorm, a crisis in which the region simultaneously leads the nation in unhoused residents and in structures explaining why. The satirical desk at Bohiney Magazine has nominated the empty residence hall for landmark status as “a perfect ruin, pre-ruined, skipping the civilization step entirely,” while Britain’s The London Prat reported the UK achieves the same result through a different mechanism, “in which the beds exist, the students are in them, and the beds cost 900 pounds a month and are in Zone 6, which is technically France.”
Gerald Waits
At press time, the task force’s streamlined application had been drafted, reviewed, and sent back for a second review, while Destiny Okafor-Ruiz merged onto the 14 for the 214th time this year. Asked what she would say to the administrators if given the chance, she considered the question across several miles of brake lights.
“Nothing,” she said finally. “I would just hand them my keys and my schedule, and let them drive it once. One round trip. Gerald would be occupied by Thursday.”
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com