High costs leave healthy food options out of reach

BY STEVEN MATTHEWS Staff Writer

Students at Long Beach State want healthy food but when the shops and restaurants bring in variety and options, they don’t get always get purchased.

One of the requests that the staff of the 49er Shops gets often is that they should offer more healthy food options in their stores, but the demand may outweigh the number of students that are buying the healthy choices.

Clint Campbell is the facilities manager for the 49er Shops which includes The Outpost, The Nugget, The Caffeine Lab, the vending machines and all the convenience-type shops on campus.

He says that the students aren’t often buying the healthy food offered because there’s not enough variety in where the healthy options are sold or the cost.

Campbell said that food storage space isn’t the same in every 49er Shop facility on campus.

“The Outpost has a much larger cold vault space, it can do more. The Caffeine Lab really has a lot of pressure up there because that was previously a Starbucks location, so the food component of that space was not a primary driver of what’s in there,” Campbell said.

Campbell also pointed out that depending on future budget allocations, the Caffeine Lab would eventually receive a re-

BY EMILY BLOMQUIST Staff Writer

Long Beach State students struggle to find their own apartments in the city due to the high cost of rent as the university does not provide off-campus apartments.

While there are outside resources available to find housing, students may 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 of their campus. University Village is a student-focused apartment complex located near several CSU campuses.

frigeration space upgrade to allow for more options.

Another issue with variety is that in order to prevent waste, the stores and restaurants only order what they think the students will buy. If the students don’t buy it, the stores and restaurants need to decide what to do with it.

If the healthy items aren’t chosen in the restaurants, the ingredients can be used later. Convenience stores don’t have that option because the healthy food they offer is pre-wrapped. If students don’t buy those, they have to be thrown out.

“Trying to allocate the resources, ingredients and items that we bring into the stores, proportionate to the sales, sometimes doesn’t mesh with the desire of the students who are in a smaller population,” Campbell said.

Students on campus also say the cost is part of the reason why they don’t purchase healthy options.

“I guess the pricing is I guess what I’d expect for a college campus like it is on the higher side,” said Muneeb Ahmed, a third-year communications major. “I guess I already kind of came in with the expectation that they would be priced a little more expensive.”

Other students have to make other choices for healthy food because of the price.

“A lot of the good ones cost more,” Kameron Perry, a second-year communications major, said. “Making food at home is probably the best way I have, especially healthier foods, to get them at an affordable price.

The 49er Shops gets feedback from students about the food choice offerings through social media and comments to team members in the stores. It’s sometimes difficult to determine the number of students requesting healthy options.

“You have people who are asking for things and we want to be responsive to that,” Campbell said. “Whether it’s the same person asking ten times, or ten different people asking the same question is a completely different scenario.”

Campbell believes that the number of students that are requesting healthy options is growing despite that. He also said it’s still a challenge to provide students with the variety they want without ordering the food in such an excess that a lot of it gets wasted.

“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 Long Beach State students. The complex has many locations in other college towns, including CSU Fullerton, 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, or explore Zillow, Craigslist or rentcollagepads.com.

CSULB student Kevin Gutierrez said he spent two months trying to find an apartment. He found his roommates from dorming with them on campus his first year at Long Beach.

“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 20222023 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 school is toward 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.”