The design solution for California’s homeless crisis may come in the form of steel Lego-like modular units with electricity, showers and key-pad locks that are assembled by forklift into temporary communities on public land.

That is the vision of state Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, who promoted his Senate Bill 1395 this past week in Sacramento. He was joined by co-authors Assemblymember Gregg Hart, D-Santa Barbara, and state Sen. Catherine Blakespear, D-Encinitas, who both called for local governments to allow these places to be sited on public land.

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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.