Water world
Gentrification, it seems, is affecting even those who aren’t on land.
Sausalito’s famous houseboats, for decades an affordable, countercultural refuge, are filling up with people one might find in any well-to-do suburb.
“Now,” writes Lars Åberg, “you will encounter the lawyers and doctors and retired literature professors, who appreciate the relaxed and somewhat different lifestyle, the younger office workers who commute to the city on a local ferry, and some of the old-timers who fought for a hard-to-find Utopia.”
Åberg is the author of a handsome and invaluable new large-format art book, “Floating in Sausalito,” released by German publisher Kerber Verlag. Full of vibrant photographs by fellow Swede Lars Strandberg, the book documents the one-of-a-kind community of more than 400 houseboats that dot Richardson Bay, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Yes, the houseboats grew popular in the 1960s, when thousands of people fled the workaday world to pursue more creative lives in makeshift floating homes. It’s here, on a rented houseboat, that Otis Redding began writing what would become his hit song “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.”
But the history of the area goes back much further. As Åberg writes, citing the book “Houseboats of Sausalito” by the late Chronicle cartoonist Phil Frank, the boat community drew manual laborers as far back as the 1880s, if not earlier.
As much as the community might be changing these days, many residents interviewed in “Floating in Sausalito” maintain that the allure of the place is undiminished.
“The social life here is something you’re not gonna find anywhere else,” says Michele Affronte, who has lived on the Bateau de Rêve (the Dream Boat) for more than 20 years. “We’re in and out of each other’s houses, we share dinners, everything, and I think that’s hard to find these days, because people usually go home and close their doors and that’s it.”