IN 1988, the tenants of a mobile home community in Novato formed a nonprofit corporation for the specific purpose of purchasing the park and facilitating its conversion into a resident-owned park. Thirty-seven years later, a new generation of residents are still trying to buy it.

Nestled between two green hills, just east of the Loma Verde Preserve in Novato, a cluster of white mobile homes at the Marin Valley Mobile Country Club face the rising sun over San Pablo Bay. The 400 aging renters who live there said they love looking down across a field of safflower at the water and watching the marsh hawks and deer. They are willing to pay $23.5 million to buy the park. The city wants $26 million.

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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.