Officials tighten policies for dock housing
County acts to regulate houseboat relocations
Marin County has tightened its regulations governing floating homes from outside the county.
The Board of Supervisors approved changes to the county code, specifying for the first time that anyone seeking to move a floating home into Marin must obtain a relocation permit. The new ordinance, approved Feb. 27, also makes more explicit the requirements for three other types of permits associated with floating homes.
For some floating home residents in Sausalito, the changes in the regulations have been a long time coming.
“We have been asking for 16 months to review and change the process by which floating homes are granted only an occupancy permit to move into Waldo Point Harbor, which translates into virtually no oversight by Marin County of what vessels are being towed into our marinas,” Candice Gold, who lives in a floating home at Issaquah
Dock, wrote in a December email to county officials.
Gold highlighted her concern about a pending application to move a floating home from the Docktown Marina in Redwood City to Issaquah Dock.
Docktown was a community of houseboats that settled on state property in the Redwood Channel east of Highway 101.
The City Council in Redwood City voted in 2016 to evict the boats and their residents. “Here we are,” Gold wrote, “with no systems or transparent due process in place to truly oversee the relocation of another floating home into our marina that will inform or protect surrounding homeowners and our community.”
The application Gold is referring to was filed in August 2022 by Dietrick Burks, a resident of Oakley. Burks declined to be quoted. Gold's email said the application was rejected by the county and the floating home was subsequently remodeled in San Rafael.
After Burks filed his application in August, 90 residents of Issaquah Dock signed a petition to the Board of Supervisors and the management of Waldo Point Harbor expressing
their concerns about his plans.
The petition stated that Burks intended to make way for the floating home from Docktown by removing and destroying a houseboat at No. 4 Issaquah Dock, which was created using a 1911 historic tugboat. The petition added that the replacement would be a “far larger floating home that is out of character with our dock.” The dispute isn't the first time the floating home community in Marin has expressed concerns about a houseboat being brought in from outside the county.
Approximately four years ago, Paul Bergeron, a real estate agent who buys and sells floating homes, caused a stir when he relocated a floating home from Docktown to Richardson Bay Marina, formerly known as Kappa's Marina.
“Change makes people feel uncomfortable,” said Bergeron, who lives in a houseboat at Richardson Bay Marina, but not the one that he relocated from Docktown.
“People's objections are not all that well educated,” Bergeron said. “They're more a matter of feelings than they are related to
statutory requirements or the civil process that you go through to obtain a permit.” William Kelley, a deputy director in the county's building and safety division, said, “That is a highvalue market down there, both for homes and also for short-term rentals.”
Kelley said people can buy a houseboat outside of Marin and then either boost its selling price or increase its earning potential as a rental by towing it to Marin.
Kelley said that following the county code changes, anyone seeking a permit to relocate a floating home must submit documentation regarding its height, width and other characteristics.
If the measurements fail to comply with county regulations, the permit won't be issued. When county supervisors approved the changes in February, Supervisor Stephanie Moulton-Peters, whose district includes Sausalito, noted that Ian Moody, a Sausalito resident who built and repaired many of the county's houseboats, died in 2021.
“When we had one local boat builder, we didn't need this kind of standardization because the process worked in an organic fashion,” Moulton-Peters said.
“But now that we have people bringing boats in from other communities, it's important to have the standards clarified and made very transparent.”
Kelley said that because of additional comments from the community following the code change in February, further refinement of the ordinance will be on the supervisors' consent calendar Tuesday.
Under those proposed changes, anyone seeking a floating home occupancy transfer permit would have to submit to an onsite inspection to ensure the houseboat is safe.