Thousands of Long Beach State students will soon begin their search for off-campus apartments for the fall semester
One of the biggest struggles for students is finding their own apartments in the city with high rent costs as the university does not provide off-campus apartments.
While there are outside resources available to find housing, students run the risk of being scammed.
In the United States alone, over 11,000 people reported a loss of over $350 million due to online scams when trying to get housing. That’s a 64% increase from 2020, according to an FBI report released in 2022.
The average price of rent in Long Beach for a one-bedroom apartment is $2,623 per month, according to rentcafe.com. Areas with below-average rent, such as Addams near Bixby North, Cherry Manor in North Long Beach and College Square near Compton, all still had an average rent of $1,812 per month.
To battle the annual rise of rent prices in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed California Assembly Bill 1482, which capped annual rent increase for the next 10 years by 10%, effective July 1, 2022, as reported by longbeach.gov.
Long Beach residents do not have rent-controlled apartments. While landlords are able to increase rent prices, the new bill in place will help tenants cap their annual rent increase by 10%.
There are apartment complexes, such as University Village, which are focused on providing affordable rent for students and are located within close proximity to campuses. University Village is a student-focused apartment complex located near several CSU campuses.
“My school also does not have off-campus apartments affiliated with Fullerton. However, the village apartments are close to it because they were created specifically for Fullerton students,” said Ashley Nguyen, a student at California State University, Fullerton.
There are no University Village apartments for CSULB students. The complex has many locations in other college towns, including CSUF, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Riverside and CSU San Marcos.
CSULB advises students to look on social media and links to Facebook groups to find roommates, explore Zillow, Craigslist or rentcollagepads.com.
Kevin Gutierrez said he spent two months trying to find an apartment. He found his roommates after living with them in the campus dorms during his first year at CSULB.
“Finding the apartment for four people was the difficult part because I was the one put in charge of looking for an apartment,” Gutierrez said. “After living in our apartment for a while we tried to find a better place but didn’t have any luck.”
California resident students living off-campus pay a total estimate of $25,688 per semester for tuition, room and board, and transportation, according to the 2022-2023 Cost of Attendance. Students living on campus pay an additional $1,000 more than off-campus students.
The CSULB master plan is an outline of renovations the school will undergo through 2035 to improve the campus but does not include plans to build apartments for students.
The focus of the renovations are focused on updating the infrastructure of the older buildings, and as it is stated in the plan, “less physical growth, and more about optimizing the existing campus.”