Jose Del Real: Crossing between Mexico and the United States is an everyday practice for people living in the border towns of the Southwest. But for transgender women like Jess Enriquez Taylor, who is Mexican but grew up in the United States and has a green card, crossing between countries also requires her to move uncomfortably between genders.

When I met her last winter, she could not afford an apartment in California, but her family and neighbors on the Mexican side demanded she live as a man. So she chose instead to be homeless in America, sleeping on friends’ couches or sometimes in someone’s garage.

[Read the story: At the Border, Transgender Women Navigate 2 Worlds]

Thomas Fuller: Journalism is often a critique without solutions. This piece was both. It pointed to vulnerabilities in the way we engineer buildings for earthquakes. And it showed how engineers in Japan design stronger, more resilient buildings.

[Read the story: Buildings Can Be Designed to Withstand Earthquakes. Why Doesn’t the U.S. Build More of Them?]

Miriam Jordan: It’s especially rewarding when a sad story comes to a happy ending. We wrote about Isabel Bueso, invited to California as a young girl to participate in a drug trial at U.C. San Francisco for her rare disease, which causes dwarfism.

After years in the United States helping researchers and receiving treatment that prolonged her life, Ms. Bueso and her family were advised by the Trump administration that they must leave the country or face deportation under a surprise new policy. The article drew attention to the plight of Ms. Bueso and other immigrants with life-threatening illnesses who would face death if forced to return to their home countries. This was the first story. Others followed. The administration reversed its decision.

[Read the story: Sick Migrants Undergoing Lifesaving Care Can Now Be Deported]

And me? I had been reporting on homelessness frequently for California Today. But in this story, which I worked on with my colleague Robert Gebeloff, we dug into how the severe housing shortage, decades in the making, has destabilized life for working families who don’t own homes.