The first anchor-outs are thought to have settled in abandoned boats bobbing atop Marin County’s Richardson Bay after nearby San Francisco’s famous earthquake and fires of 1906. Over the next century or so, the community drew artists and bohemians; mariners looking for a long-term anchorage (sanctuary for those at sea); and, increasingly after the 2008 Great Recession, people struggling to afford housing, who preferred sleeping on the volatile but breathtaking waters just off Sausalito over taking shelter in tents or cars on land.
When journalist Joe Kloc started reporting on the anchor-outs in 2015 for a Harper’s article, he was taken by the group’s oddball characters, colorful backstories, and its rituals. They grew produce on board their unseaworthy vessels, mourned their dead by sending burning model boats out to sea, and many of them belonged to a unique congregation called Pirate Church.
“Even the most nautically adept anchor-outs were inherently vulnerable to the hazards of stormy weather, hull delamination, dry rot, and the 1 percent.”
Life could seem idyllic. But “even the most nautically adept anchor-outs were inherently vulnerable to the hazards of stormy weather, hull delamination, dry rot, and the 1 percent,” Kloc writes in his new book Lost at Sea: Poverty and Paradise Collide at the Edge of America. As he observed the anchor-outs over the next nine years, the community was torn apart in what Kloc portrays as a cruel debacle—and a damning illustration of how America’s well-off communities often treat their poor.
Marin County is one of the nation’s wealthiest, with the median income exceeding $130,000 by one estimate, and the median home value at about $1.4 million. But not everyone enjoys such riches—the gap between the affluent and the poor yawned open after the Great Recession, and more of the county’s chronically unhoused residents began to sleep in RVs or on the streets. “In turn, the size of the anchorage,” Kloc reports, “which had remained stable at around one hundred vessels for decades, had doubled by the mid-2010s.” The growth seemed to correspond with an increase in clashes between the anchor-outs and their neighbors on shore, which led to the unfortunate series of events that make up Lost at Sea‘s central narrative.
Starting in the late 20-teens, the county’s Richardson Bay Regional Agency (RBRA) picked up its enforcement of a long-ignored rule stating that boats seeking anchorage needed to leave after 72 hours. Anchor-outs said they began to see more of their boats seized and then crushed, along with personal belongings collected over decades. During the pandemic, a contingent of them—lacking a local homeless shelter to turn to, since Sausalito had long elected not to build one—set up a tent encampment in the city’s Dunphy Park, only to be evicted and moved to another encampment right next to the facility crushing the boats they’d once called home. And when the city of Sausalito disbanded that encampment as well, most of the remaining anchor-outs scattered. Now, only about 10 boats remain in the Bay, and they’re all scheduled to be gone by 2026.
I originally met Kloc when we did the Mother Jones fellowship together more than a decade ago. I recently caught up with him about Lost at Sea via phone call, days before attending his book reading near Sausalito—an event that morphed from literary gathering into a mini–town hall meeting, during which salty Sausalito residents, business owners, a former attorney who worked on an audit of the RBRA, and the current harbormaster himself opined on a controversy that is still very much alive for the city, even as the anchor-outs themselves have all but disappeared.
This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Your main guide through the story was a guy named Innate Thought. Why do you think he and this close-knit community—who have so many reasons to suspect outsiders given all the controversy surrounding them—trusted you?
When I was doing the Harper’s article version, I’d imagine that I would spend a couple years going back there periodically, getting to know people. I would guess that made people more open to the idea. I remember Innate telling Larry, who was the guy who lived on Shel Silverstein’s boat [the Evil Eye], when he first introduced us, he said, ‘Oh, he’s a journalist, but he’s not looking for a scoop.’ I would guess he was saying something along the lines of, he’s here a while.
“It’s maybe somewhat surprising that people who have such difficult lives day to day, in many cases, are so warm and inviting, but it was almost like the code of the place.”
It’s maybe somewhat surprising that people who have such difficult lives day to day, in many cases, are so warm and inviting, but it was almost like the code of the place: that you’re going to be friendly and welcoming, you share what you have. You really got the sense that, as a community, they wanted it to be one of their values that set them apart from the life we live on land.
At the same time, there were certainly some people who didn’t want to talk to me. It wasn’t like everybody was always thrilled.
You report on how the reasons they became anchor-outs varied. Did you have any preconceived notions about who you thought they were and what led them to Richardson Bay?
When I first heard about them, it sounded more like this very intentional off-the-grid art community, almost like, “Oh, these are quirky, offbeat people who want to make art on the water.” I really didn’t understand the degree to which it was a place for people who were struggling with being unhoused, and had formed such a robust and at this point historic, century-old community. It hadn’t initially occurred to me that so many of them had gone through a big financial struggle, so that really surprised me.
Eventually I met some people who were sailors. And they had never intended to stay, but because the the harbormaster and the powers that be had tried to get them out when they were just using it as a stopover, as an anchorage for a little while, they kind of became consumed by the righteousness of the cause and the injustice. The idea of, like, ‘Hey, wait a second, I’m a sailor; sailors need anchorages.’ So for them, it also became tied to this idea of, this isn’t yours to take away.
Did you enjoy the nights that you slept on some of the anchor-outs’ boats?
It surprised me how uncomfortable it was. The first night I spent on Innate’s boat, it was during the spring, pretty warm during the day. I had no idea how cold the inside of the boat got at night. Someone told me that’s because once the sun goes down, the water temperature drops, and the water basically sucks the heat out of the hulls of the boats. It was such a chilly, damp cold.
And the boats aren’t that close to each other, so you are kind of isolated and alone at night. The lock is the type of lock there might be on a cabin door at camp when you were a kid, so nothing is very secure. And I remember that first night just getting very little sleep, because I would just lay there, and I was so cold, and I would just hear a little dinghy, or some sort of small craft, maybe a kayak, come really right up to the door, and you would hear people talking in it, and you’re just like, Oh my God. Like, are they going to come in here? There was something about it that felt like, wow, this every day, it would really grind me down.
But on the other side, the fond memory I have of that particular night is waking up the next day and you’re standing on the makeshift dock floating off the boat, and the sun’s coming up, and there’s birds landing on the boat. I was with Innate eating leftovers. So it’s a complicated swirl of emotion, for sure, which I think encapsulates the whole place.
I sensed that you were clearly fond of some of the members of the community. It didn’t seem like you were just under the spell of this romanticized idea of living at sea and this bohemian lifestyle and self-sufficiency. I felt like there were other things that endeared them to you.
Oh, yeah. I mean, that self-sufficiency, in general, for whatever reason, doesn’t even particularly attract me—I have no aspirations towards living alone in the woods. It really wasn’t that. It’s a lot of things; the kindness was something that really endeared me to them. The way in which, even when people didn’t really get along with each other, they helped each other. There was like a code, you know, at the end of it all, no matter what the squabbles or beefs, if someone is in need of help, you help them. If someone is in need of food, you feed them.
I remember Innate explaining to me there was an older gentleman who he had a lot of complicated friction with. And he had spent the whole day kind of unexpectedly helping this guy to right his boat and fix what needed to be fixed. And he just explained it to me as: I’ll help you. I may not like you, but I’ll help you, but then I’ll tell you I don’t like you, just to keep it straight. To see even little things like, somebody sitting in the grass and rolling a cigarette. And if they saw somebody else sitting there, and they probably knew that they would like a cigarette, they’d be like, ‘Oh, can I roll you one?’
Oftentimes, there was a woman who lived in Sausalito, but her son had been an anchor-out at some point, and so she had affection for them, and she would bring these little mandarin oranges, leave these bags around in Dunphy Park on the shore. When the anchor-outs would get them, it was like they were always distributing them, trying to make sure that everybody got some, like, have your vitamins, you know. There’s just a lot of looking out, and this idea that caring about one another can transcend your personal histories and personal feelings about one another.
There was an average of 90 boats questionably anchored in Richardson Bay every year in the early 2000s, but that number grew to something like 240 in 2016. What were some of the possible reasons for that uptick?
I think a lot of that had to do with the Great Recession following the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Something you would frequently hear when someone would explain their story, wrapped up in it would be a divorce. You lose your home in the divorce, and then once you don’t have a home, you’re kind of struggling to figure something out. Maybe you’re in your car, you eventually lose your car. A lot of people just fell through. I think there’s a common misconception that everybody finds themselves in these situations because they’re addicted to drugs or something, or have a mental illness. But studies have shown—there hasn’t been a study particularly about the anchorage—but studies have shown that for the majority that’s not true.
So when you have 2008, a lot of people in Marin County, in Sausalito, start actually getting wealthier. It only takes a few years until their their investments are doing better than before that crisis. Frequently, Marin County appears as one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. So you have people who were kind of one lost job or one divorce away from losing everything. Then you have a Sausalito that’s getting wealthier and wealthier, meaning home prices are going up. And a contraction of a lot of these middle class jobs. A lot of people, this is where their ties are and they can’t get a home here. But what are you going to do? Go to another place with no money, no home, no job, and have no ties? So you kind of find yourself in these circumstances. And it almost tripled the size of the anchorage in the span of a decade or so.
The subtitle of your book is Poverty and Paradise Collide at the Edge of America. There was something that spoke to me about the moment we are in now as a country, or the moment that we’re floating towards. Billionaires are getting tax breaks, and then DOGE is trying to slash through the safety net for the poor. Has your book felt even more relevant since you finished it?
Yeah. When I was writing it, I had imagined that maybe it was going to bring up a discussion about how we need to start really putting in policy muscle, and for wealthier liberals to accept some level of discomfort to start addressing these issues.
Instead, obviously, the book kind of landed in this bizarro world. Now I think it’s still saying that, but now it’s almost saying that in terms of, Look, if we don’t address these issues, these people who really are catering to the wealthiest people in our country, they are running amok with everything because these things aren’t addressed. We’re already at this kind of broader consequence phase a lot faster than anyone imagined.
“We have these stated beliefs about caring about people who are in difficult situations, but we have to really put our money where our mouths are.”
So now I hope that this book can be a way of showing people, Okay, we have these stated beliefs about caring about people who are in difficult situations, but we have to really put our money where our mouths are, and we have to really start doing something. And I hope that what this book shows is the degree to which these are communities that you don’t want to dismantle, you don’t want to lose. Not only are they essential for people who are struggling, but that they have their own histories, their own cultures, and they make a place richer.
There was this poignant moment during one of the city council meetings that you included in the book where Jeff, one of the anchor-outs, said, “Trump is a landlord now and acting as one for monied interests around the country. If you are going to be a resistance to it, then be one.” That was such a mic drop.
Yeah. I think Jeff really spotted that early on. That was 2017 or something, so right after that first election. He spotted that hypocrisy and zeroed in on it, maybe a lot earlier than—I think it became more common knowledge after 2020. He was kind of cautioning people about that.
One of the only things I had ever heard about the anchor-outs was that that they were using Richardson Bay as a toilet. But as you’ve pointed out in the book, the amount of pollution from this community of just a few hundred people pales in comparison to the wastewater that has gone directly into the Bay from neighborhoods in Marin during overflow events or storm surges.
One thing that is sort of important to me when I’m talking about these criticisms of them is that for me it’s more about the response than it is about debating the issue. There is more human waste in Richardson Bay when there’s 200 boats living on it than when there isn’t, definitely. But regardless, it still seems outlandish to argue that you should evict people and crush their boats and essentially make them homeless because of this. It’s not about arguing whether there’s any truth to the rationale. It’s about understanding that these are human beings, and that is not a rationale to treat them how they’re being treated.
“If you had a neighbor who was leaving trash on their lawn or in the road, you wouldn’t go to your city council meeting and say, ‘We have to bulldoze their home.’”
It’s like if you had a neighbor who was leaving trash on their lawn or in the road, you wouldn’t go to your city council meeting and say, ‘We have to bulldoze their home.’ Nobody would ever think of doing that. And for some of these anchor-outs, they’ve been there 50 years, 40 years. Imagine what is in their boats. Journals, letters, keepsakes, old photographs, address books, all these things that just end up getting destroyed and getting lost. And then, you know, they end up in a tent in a muddy encampment, and then get scattered from there. Is that really a just response? Just saying, like, Ah, well, some of their waste goes into the Bay.
The other point often raised against them is there has been a pretty impassioned network of environmentalists arguing that the anchor-out boats are doing damage to eelgrass, which is almost this keystone plant of the marine ecosystem. I’m curious whether you’ve come across solutions that would allow boats to remain there and avoid that problem.
To some degree, yeah. There’s a guy in the book, Doug, who was very good at navigating both the world and culture of the anchorage and the world and the culture of Sausalito. It’s not like everybody is some evil person who wants to evict them; there are plenty of people in Sausalito who think what’s happening to them is wrong, and care for them and help them. Anyway Doug was very good at trying to find a solution that could appease both sides, and he had sort of settled on a mooring field, which would have essentially been permanent anchors in the bottom of the bay. Those wouldn’t drag and so they wouldn’t leave the same kind of circular wound in the seabed and in the eelgrass.
It’s sort of interesting to consider how both sides responded. There was a contingent, according to him, on the Sausalito side he was negotiating with that really felt that it wasn’t a good idea, because it would make the anchor-out permanent, and it was like a step in the wrong direction. And so that kind of shows you right there that just taking care of the eelgrass is not going to satisfy everyone.
But then, interestingly enough, a lot of the anchor-outs also didn’t like the idea, and one of their big concerns was, if we make this a mooring field, the same thing would happen that happened 40 years earlier in [Sausalito’s] Houseboat Wars, when you had all of these DIY homes in the water. Over time, they were kind of evicted and replaced with million-dollar floating homes. They were basically saying, ‘Look, if we put in this mooring field, and we make these kind of permanent spots where people can live, it is only a matter of time until those start just getting sold to the highest bidder.’ Essentially, the anchor-outs would have sold away the future of the anchorage for their own convenience.
One thread of the book follows these city council meetings and the repeated refusal of Sausalito to construct a homeless shelter that could have provided beds to some of the anchor-outs in need. Recently, the city started offering a program that makes them eligible for a housing voucher for an apartment on land, along with a buy-back fee for their boat if their vessel is removed from the Bay. I’m curious what some of your sources think about that approach—isn’t this what some of them wanted in the first place, more permanent housing?
I think that people think that’s good. But what happened to, you know, 200 of the people living out there before that solution came to pass? Largely, now, this book is almost historic record more than it is contemporary, because so much of what it’s about has vanished. I talked to an anchor-out the day before yesterday, and he said there’s maybe 10 boats left out there. So the anchorage as a refuge for people in need is gone, and it was removed with most of those people not getting the help they needed.
“The anchorage as a refuge for people in need is gone, and it was removed with most of those people not getting the help they needed.”
I think it’s maybe worth the powers that be in the various local municipalities involved from this reflecting, well, what if we had cared like this in the beginning, instead of smashing so many homes? I mean, the Marinship Park encampment was surreal, having been out for years on the anchorage, off and on—and then to come and see all these people packed into this little muddy, cold, wet encampment and everybody kind of in dire straits. It was just crazy that that would be seen as the right step to be taking, instead of this, to begin with.
I don’t want to paint Sausalito as some bad place full of bad people. It’s just like, when you have gross inequality, I think that it becomes very easy for anyone who’s living the high life to forget the totality of the circumstances of the people who aren’t.
I would wonder if you were to go back and ask so many people who maybe 10, even five years ago, were enthusiastic about the idea of evicting the anchor-outs—after having gone through having these encampments on the shore, even just money the town spent maintaining these things, if all those people would say, yes, I still think it was right what I was arguing for. I would guess probably a lot of them would not; probably a lot of them would say I did not understand what this would cause for people. So hopefully, in the future, people will think more about what these things can cause for people’s lives.
Is there anything else that you wish people would ask you about the book?
Often with books of this nature, dealing with topics like inequality and poverty, there’s a section at the end that’s sort of like, what are the solutions? I didn’t do that deliberately. I really just don’t know. I think it is complicated to try to untangle everything at this point.
The one thing that I’m sure is part of that solution, though—what I want the book to speak to—is that we need to take a more empathetic view towards people who are struggling. So many people, it’s like they abstractly care when someone’s in a bad situation. But if that person has any characteristics or habits they don’t like, or if the reason they’re in a situation is from some something that the observer feels like is a mistake they made, or some bad behavior of theirs, then it’s so quick to just suddenly move them into the discard pile.
When you’re around the anchor-outs, you see how they don’t do that to each other, and you see how not doing that to each other is such an important part of making life for them happy and livable. If we could take a page and find some of that empathy—whatever the solution might be, I’ll leave that to other books, but I think that is sort of the key component.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.