To address the state’s housing crisis, California enacted a Statewide Housing Plan in 2022. It says that every city and county must build its share of new homes to meet a total of 2.5 million new homes the state estimates it will need by 2031. San Francisco’s part of the job is to build 82,000 units by the same deadline.

On Monday, state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, and San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced that the city will be the first in the state subject to Senate Bill 423, a new California law that is triggered if the state determines a city is falling behind on its housing goals. It directs governments to streamline permitting processes to bypass local obstacles and regulations.

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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.