This housing war happening on water
Off Sausalito, eviction can mean a crushed boat
It was a relatively peaceful morning at Dunphy Park, a tent city near Sausalito’s waterfront — until they got the call. Someone’s boat had been pulled in off the bay, and it was about to get crushed by the authorities.
Within minutes, people at the encampment — many of them former boaters who have been living on vessels anchoredout illegally in the middle of Richardson Bay — raced over to the scene of the action, just under a mile away.
There, at the small rocky cove hidden behind Mar inship Park, was the scene of the latest battle in what has become a decadeslong war between the anchorage community and the regional agency that enforces rules in the estuary. Over the
course of the last few months, the agency has increased its focus on removing — and, if necessary, destroying — the boats, and the consequences have stretched far beyond the waterfront and into Sausalito and its greater homeless community at large.
The protesters from the encampment took their stand on the rocks, with signs that said “I Love my Boat” and “Give Us Peace,” and called out to the faction on the other side of the water — the Richardson Bay Regional Agency’s harbormaster, Curtis Havel, who was standing with law enforcement. Just below Havel was the sailboat in question. It belonged
to the protesters’ friend, and was moments away from being pulled up onto the ramp of the boatyard, where it would meet its fate with a large, dieselpowered hydraulic arm tasked with crushing the vessel.
As the sun was blazing its rays onto the inlet, a protester named Skip, who has been living fulltime out on the water, squinted out to the expanse of Richardson Bay, where she struggled to make out her vessel in the sea of white boats moored in the middle of the anchorage. “I think it’s that one,” she said. She had just gotten a notice to move it — but for now, to the best of her knowledge, it was safe.
That’s when Robbie Powelson climbed around the fencedoff area and dogpaddled across the waterway to the boat, holding up the camp’s trademark rainbow flag, whose cormorant cast over the water like a halo. His fellow comrades on the rocks cheered as he lifted himself up onto the boat and climbed aboard, holding the flag up in the air.
It wasn’t the first time he’d done this — once, the 27yearold protester had even chained himself to a boat. But Powelson knew that, at best, occupying this boat was a way to draw attention to the situation at Richardson Bay, and to stall. It wasn’t a permanent solution, but in this ongoing war, any tactics were worth trying.
To the larger community of salty sea outsiders, Richardson Bay has been known as the last free anchorage out on the bay, and, for decades, a group of boaters who make up the anchorage community and call themselves “anchorouts” have been living freely, and illegally, out on the water.
Their vessels — most of them sailboats fixed with skiffs or kayaks that allow them to get back on shore — bob like white hats out in the middle of Richardson Bay and almost act like sea artifacts for the thousands of kayakers and tourists who come into Sausalito every year, paddling around them on their way to other parts of the waterfront.
But now, the anchorouts have been at the center of an intensifying dispute with regional and state authorities over how the anchorage should be enforced. As a technical anchorage, boaters who cruise into Richardson Bay are required to leave after 72 hours — and according to the code, after seven days, they can come back for another 72hour period. But over the decades, Richardson Bay earned a reputation for being a bohemian anchorage where people could come, drop hook and stay as long as they pleased. Some of the boaters have been there for more than 50 years.
The urgency now to get them out of the water is coming from the state, which has put pressure on the regional agency to enforce its own rules — which means getting rid of all the permanent anchorouts in Richardson Bay in the next five years, but ideally even sooner. They say the anchorouts have brought crime to the area and that their boats — many of which are not properly maintained — pose hazards to each other and to the eelgrass ecosystem underwater.
In the last couple of years, Havel, the harbor master, said he’s had to pull up a slew of junk from the bottom of the bay — generators, bicycles, dinghies, engine blocks and even a keg.
“It’s kind of breathtaking,” he said. “It’s not a dumping ground.”
But many of the anchorouts say they don’t want to leave, and that the anchorage isn’t just a place to moor their boots, but a DIY community that has become their only option amid the insurmountable costs of living in the Bay Area. And even if they wanted to leave, they say they wouldn’t really have anywhere to go.
In many ways, the conflict has become a larger reflection of the untenable state of living and displacement in the Bay Area, but even more complex because it’s taking place on the water.
“Out of this culture came beautiful music, a lot of freedom, great art, and a lot of people just living off the grid, in a lowimpact way that wasn’t hurting other people,” said Jeff Jacob Chase, 59, who has been an anchorout since 2000. “I would hate to see all of that die because somebody has an idea that everybody needs to live the same, in a homogeneous blob. That homogeneous blob will kill us.”
Compared to the tony and stylish houseboats that line Sausalito’s waterfront, the community of anchorouts and their downhome vessels has been a fixture of civic counterculture for decades, a foil against the city’s growing expansion into a paradise for sea luxury, and its foray into the great profit to be made from prime waterfront property. But the different strokes of houseboat culture have also been a point of contention.
In the 1970s, houseboat tension in Sausalito was so high that municipal powers cracked down and prompted a violent encounter that would be later known as the “Houseboat Wars.” After a sheriff towed a houseboat to the heliport to be crushed, the boat’s owner tried to cut the connecting line — and the cops drew their guns.
The tides, it seems, haven’t changed much. Over the decades a small group of boaters started anchoring out in the middle of Richardson Bay. By the early 2000s, it was already an established community that had carved out its own space. Even though the 72hour limit on anchoring had been in place since the 1980s, the anchorouts say they lived more or less peacefully, especially under the reign of Havel’s predecessor, Bill Price.
But by 2015, the number of vessels in the water had nearly tripled from about 90 to as many as 250, said Havel, and the situation with illegal mooring was getting harder to control. In 2017, Lt. William Fraass of the Sausalito Police Department told The Chronicle that the department had fielded a swath of complaints about crime, theft, drunkenness, trash, garbage, abandoned boats, beached boats and more.
During a recent tour of the anchorage, a boat owner named Lauren Moody told The Chronicle that someone in the anchorage offered her “crystal for some gasoline.” She didn’t take the drugs, she said, but gave the person gasoline.
Since 2019, when Price retired, Havel’s marching orders have been to clear the anchorage of permanent anchorouts. The orders are coming from the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which was audited and reprimanded by the state, who found its enforcement of rules in the estuary was lacking.
Havel said in the last two years, he’s personally removed, and destroyed, more than 120 vessels in the water. He says he prioritizes the unoccupied or unseaworthy vessels first. Havel says he gives the anchorouts notices to move their boats, many of which he claims don’t have working engines or masts, making it difficult for them to be moved.
As for the conservation and development commission, Executive Director Larry Goldbandz says the commission has never told the RBRA to crush a boat, or for that matter, how to enforce the anchorage. Rather he says, they have just been told that the “anchorage needs to be enforced.”
But the anchorouts say the way they’re being displaced — similar to the forced evictions that are regular occurrences in homeless encampments around the Bay Area — is cruel. “We think it’s illegal for them to do what they’re doing,” said Anthony Prince, a lawyer who has represented multiple anchorouts and is general counsel for the California Homeless Union. “Without compensation, to destroy this property … is on its face unconstitutional as far as we’re concerned. Not just immoral, but illegal.”
The anchorage community rejects Havel’s claims about adequate notice, and members say they’ve lost essential belongings like ashes, childhood photos, and important documents. In April, a highprofile encounter between an anchorout and authorities turned violent and ended in literal flames, with the owner’s dog dying during the fire.
David McGregor, an anchorout who is known around the anchorage as “Dave the Diver” found out his sailboat had been pulled up onto the ramp on Wednesday, along with the inflatables he uses for his diving business. He had been on the anchorage for three years.
McGregor managed to retrieve some of his belongings, but not everything, because by the time he got to the boatyard his boat was already on its side, waiting to be destroyed.
“They did so much damage so fast,” he said. “It is what it is in a war zone, I guess.”
Having whittled down the number of vessels in Richardson Bay to about half of what it was when he started, Havel is now in the midst of the most complicated stage yet: removing the anchorouts themselves. Most of the vessels removed so far had been abandoned boats, Havel said.
Now, the agency is left to deal with a sea of occupied boats that are people’s primary living residences, amid a ticking clock. “We’re working right now to try to find a solution for (those) that lets people keep their dignity.”
Some of the people out on the anchorage, like McGregor, the diver who lost his boat, would want to leave some day. They dream of sailing the world, of a peaceful and nomadic lifestyle where they wouldn’t have to worry about the threat of displacement if they leave their boats unoccupied and kayak to shore.
But what they don’t want, for the most part, is to live in congregate homes or shelters. In March of 2021, two case managers for Downtown Streets Team — a nonprofit that serves homelessness in the Bay Area — started visiting the anchorouts as part of transitioning them from the water and into housing.
Their preliminary assessment found that of the people on the water now, only 20% would be willing to get off the water and surrender their boats, said Karen Strolia, the North Bay director of Downtown Streets Team. If there was a safe place to store their boats, the number jumped to 80%.
“The big crux of the challenge out there right now is that there’s this push from the state to get the boats off the water, but what’s being overlooked in that demand is that (some) people have lived on their vessels and their floating homes for decades,” Strolia said. “There’s a lot of nostalgia, and a lot of resistance to that. They don’t want to surrender the space that they’ve called home for so long.”
Even if they did, Strolia says, there’s currently no affordable housing availability in Sausalito, so any sort of conversation around getting people off the water would include both the surrender of their boats, and a move to a community that is not considered home for them — such as nearby Marin City, Novato or even farther away.
In the meantime, many of them have been in a limbo state, living parttime at the Dunphy Park encampment where they hold group meetings. Many of the people at the encampment, which calls itself Camp Cormorant, are there out of protest. Some of them are former anchorouts.
In the last month, the city of Sausalito won a battle to move that encampment to Marinship Park, the field just behind the boatyard where many of their sailboats have gotten crushed.
But the anchorouts say they’re still fighting, in part because Richardson Bay is the last anchorage where the “fight hasn’t been lost.” Chase, the anchorout who came to Richardson Bay in 2000, says he initially heard about the anchorage from a woman he met at Albany Bulb, who told him about a magical and laissezfaire spot in the sea called Richardson Bay. “She said it’s a vortex that’s going to be hard to leave, and that’s been pretty much true.”
Chase is committed to the prospect of finding a compromise with the regional agency. One of his dreams is to see it established as a small craft harbor district, where an elected board of directors could come up with policies to keep it free for mariners, but in a condition that wouldn’t be hazardous or unsafe. They’ve already drafted a petition and gathered more than 50 signatures.
“We’re working for an understanding with the hill people, and the people on the flats, and working to defend a culture that’s been here for a long, long time,” he said. “And when another culture comes to interfere with that, and say you don’t have a right to exist, that second culture fights back.”
But that reality is getting harder and harder to conjure. Right after Powelson occupied the first boat, it started tipping on its side, and he jumped onto the vessel right next to it. Both boats were safely returned to the anchorage, he said.
But a week later, he saw that the second boat had been pulled up to the ramp again and was getting ready for the guillotine. The sky was foggier that day, with clouds cast over the palatial homes that overlook the bay and whose owners have complained about the boats obstructing their views. Now, the sea would have one less bobbing hat.