Asm. David Chiu tried to pass a bill to change the towing laws affecting families and students living in their cars, but the bill was met with resistance, not from the towing companies but from the cities who did not want those changes.

By LUIS MIRÓN 
EL NUEVO SOL | ETHNIC MEDIA SERVICES

En español en La Opinion.

One out of 10 students in the California State University (CSU) system are either homeless, effectively homeless or on the border of homelessness, Asm. David Chiu (D. SF) told CSNU J-school students on a Dec. 10 video briefing. The students were completing a special report profiling students dealing with housing insecurity and had invited the legislator—a leading voice in legislative efforts to address the state’s affordable housing crisis—to talk about what policy makers can do.

The CSU system educates 482,000 students per year, according to their website, which means at least 48,200 students are affected by this issue.

Asm. Chiu introduced his two assistants to the group, both of whom have experienced housing insecurity in the Bay Area. It showed us how close he is to the issue.

“I represent San Francisco and we have been ground zero of the housing crisis in our state in part because our city has the densest urban neighborhoods in the west coast,” Chiu said. He talked about why student homelessness is hard to identify and why many of us might be going to classes with someone that is experiencing housing insecurity and not even realize it.

“You have classmates who are couch surfing on a friend’s couch, sleeping in their car, taking showers at the school gym,” said Chiu. “They might not appear as classically homeless in a way society stereotypes a chronically homeless person… but none the less they are still homeless.”

Students are struggling to both afford an education, which is not cheap, and find an affordable place to live which is extremely rare, no matter where you live in California.

Chiu’s research found that a majority of students are one check away from being homeless. In fact, if they either lost their job, got into an accident, got a sick family member or simply got a flat tire, they could spiral into homelessness. Chiu fought for passage of a bill (AB 943) that was recently signed by the governor to help students while experiencing crushing financial problems. 

On the other hand, Chiu failed to get the AB 516 bill passed just to change the towing laws in California which he says also trigger homelessness.

“Our towing laws in California lead to homelessness” because of the exhorbitant fines people have to pay to reclaim their cars which are often their only asset. “We tried to address what we referred to as ‘being towed into homelessness, debt and poverty,’ but we failed, he said.

To his surprise, he said, the opposition came not from the towing companies who actually supported the bill. It came from local elected officials whose members claimed neighborhoods didn’t want homeless people sleeping in cars on their streets.

“They mischaracterized my bill and said it was going to cause all these homeless folk to live on the streets of their beautiful neighborhoods,” said Chiu.

Assembly member David Chiu speaks to a group of students from CSUN about the growing housing crisis. Photo: Ethic Media Services.

Chiu continues to push for change and greater awareness, knowing that the pandemic is only going to exacerbate the housing crisis. In 2021, he hopes to pass bills that would lead to more construction of affordable housing.

“The solutions are obvious, we need to put a roof over every person’s head, we have to build the facilities that will do that, including shelters and permanent supporting housing.”

Chiu estimates that California is 31/2 million units shorts of affordable housing. Some 150,000 residents sleep on the streets because the state has not built enough facilities for them.

Although the briefing with Assembly member Chiu was only thirty minutes, it was an eye opener on what he and other elected officials are doing to trying to fix a growing problem that is affecting the entire nation. One takeaway was that there’s no simple solution for such a complex problem. But at the root of it is a lack of affordable housing and the resistance at local levels to new laws and regulations people fear could lower property values in their neighborhoods.

We realized the role our reporting can play in combatting stereotypes and building awareness of the human stakes in issues like towing laws.

About the author:

Luis Mirón

Luis Mirón is a Mexican Broadcast Journalist at California State University, Northridge. His passion is to tell the stories of people in his community who do not have a voice. In his third year at CSUN, he seeks to tell those stories in different multimedia formats, such as podcasts, documentaries, and photo galleries. Luis, being an immigrant himself, understands how important it is to give a voice to the problems that his Latino community faces every day. His passion for soccer attracted him to the world of journalism, but as he grew as a journalist he fell in love with helping the voiceless in communities of color and share their struggle in a way to bring change.