AFTER A YEAR of negotiations, the city of San Rafael has decided not to support a nonprofit housing arrangement with the Tesseract Capital Group, a San Francisco-based private equity firm that owns an apartment building located in the heart of the city’s Canal neighborhood.

The Canal is home to a tight community of about 16,000 people, mostly low-income Latino renters. When Tesseract acquired the 99-unit apartment building at 400 Canal St. in 2022, it soon began delivering “buy-out” letters to tenants, eventually evicting some families for renovations. In many of those cases, the tenants demanded and won their right to return, but they came back to higher rents and utility fees. The residents formed a tenants’ union.

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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.