Commentary: I was homeless in college. California can do more for students who sleep in their cars

When I first came to California to apply for graduate school in the late ’80s, I drove to Santa Monica and parked my car. There were more homeless people than I’d ever seen, living here in tents on the grass by the ocean under palm trees.

Before college, as a result of poverty, I’d slept in my car or in the woods. Then, as a community college student in Arizona, I lived in my car when I was between apartments. But I had never been to a place