A Connection That Changed Everything: Hollister’s Southside Road Story

Until recently, families living along Southside Road in Hollister, California, many of them migrant farmworkers, were living in the shadows of an increasingly digital world. Their homes at the Hollister Migrant Housing Center, Southside Labor Camp, and Southside Mobile Park had no reliable broadband. Children struggled to access virtual school. Parents couldn’t apply for jobs or access health services. The internet wasn’t a tool, it was a wall preventing hundreds of residents, especially the 130 school-aged kids, from accessing crucial services and programs.

Today the wall is down.

Thanks to a $1.77 million grant from the California Public Utilities Commission’s (CPUC) Line Extension Program (LEP), 194 households in the Southside community are now connected to high-speed fiber internet that is fast enough for education, work, healthcare, and everything in between.

The LEP, part of the California Advanced Services Fund, helps low-income residents pay for the “last mile” of broadband that connects homes to the nearest existing internet infrastructure. It’s a game-changer for communities like Southside, where building internet lines to each home is too expensive for families and they’re often overlooked by providers.

“If we learned anything during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said CPUC Analyst Ben Swearingen, “it’s that broadband is no longer a luxury. It’s foundational to economic and educational opportunity.”