Two days a week, the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market transforms San Francisco’s historic U.N. Plaza into a healthy mecca. The rest of the week the space is sickly.

Every Wednesday and Sunday, the public square is filled with thousands of residents buying fresh produce in the urban food desert. But when the farmers depart, the plaza returns to scenes of drug dealing and tragic addiction. These uses have intensified since the 2022 closure of the Tenderloin Center, a temporary site to reduce overdose deaths set up by the city’s Department of Public Health.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.