How This Campus Ministry is Tackling Student Housing Insecurity

Jeronimo Perez Flores with toiletry donations for the campus food pantry.

On September 20, 2019, Caitlin Yoshiko Kandil of Sojourners Magazine featured Canterbury Bridge in the article, “How This Campus Ministry is Tacking Student [Housing Insecurity].“.  The introductory paragraph is below:

When Jeronimo Perez Flores was accepted into San Jose State University, he never imagined that enrolling in college would lead him to homelessness.

The 22-year-old had immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico in 2014, learned English as a teenager, received a full-tuition scholarship to attend San Jose State, and became the first in his family to attend college. But since the university is about 60 miles from his family’s home in Richmond, California — a commute that goes through some of the heaviest traffic in the Bay Area — he had to look for housing near campus.

Living in the university’s dorms would have meant taking out student loans, Perez Flores said, something he was reluctant to do. Off-campus housing in the capital of Silicon Valley, where the average cost of a one-bedroom apartment is more than $2,500 per month, according to the apartment search platform Zumper, was prohibitively expensive.

So, Perez Flores started sleeping in his car at night.

“I couldn’t fit in my car, it was noisy and there were lights,” he said. “I wasn’t sleeping well, so I couldn’t concentrate in my classes because I didn’t have good rest.”

Read the whole article here