FEDERAL CUTS TO mental health and public housing, the emergence of vulnerable populations, rising housing costs, economic shifts to new industries — those were the root causes of San Francisco’s homelessness crisis in the early 1980s, and many of those same circumstances are being echoed today.

According to experts from the city speaking at a public forum last week, the future is not going to be easy.

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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.