TUCKED BENEATH FREEWAY FLYOVERS and around the fringes of residential zones are California’s transitional tiny home developments.

Clusters of one-room cabins, with doors that lock, are arranged around common spaces. Plumbed facilities — kitchen, laundry and bathrooms — are shared. A fenced curtain wraps around the whole place, shielding it from the street. A security guard staffs the gate around the clock. To an unhoused person, who has learned to rest with one eye open, a tiny home village can bring the first good night’s sleep in years.

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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.