FIRST, residents sign a memorandum of understanding. Next comes a 90-day notice with instructions for moving household belongings. For the low-income residents who depend on public housing at Golden Gate Village in Marin City, these are the precursors to a major disruption. 

The 296-unit postwar public housing project is about to undergo a multiyear renovation. The development opened in 1961 and received federal recognition for design excellence in 1964. It returned some dignity to Black workers who had been prevented from moving by racially restrictive covenants after the federal government closed the Marinship yard. 

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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.