Lost at Sea
Poverty and Paradise Collide at the Edge of America
-
-
5.0 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
A deeply personal nine-year account of the lives of the “anchor-outs”—an unhoused community living off the California coast on abandoned boats—that explores the struggles and resilience of those surviving on the fringes of society.
In the wake of the financial crisis, the number of anchor-outs living in Richardson Bay more than doubles as their long-simmering feud with the wealthy residents of Marin County—one of the richest counties in the country—finally boils over. Many of the shoreline’s well-heeled yacht club members and mansion owners blame their unhoused neighbors for rising crime on the waterfront. Meanwhile, local politicians accuse them of destroying the Bay Area’s marine ecosystem and demand their eviction. When the pandemic breaks out, a slew of city and regional authorities heed the call: they seize and crush the anchor-outs’ boats, arresting dissenters as they dismantle one of the nation’s oldest unhoused communities.
Kloc’s near-decade-long firsthand account of the joys, hardships, and eventual demise of the anchor-outs is in many ways the story of being poor in America. Examining the profit-driven policies that exacerbate the contemporary housing crisis, Lost at Sea weaves together tales of comradery and survival on the anchorage with the rich history of the region, from the creation of unspeakable wealth during the San Francisco Gold Rush era to the aftermath of the devastating earthquake and fire of 1906, when the first unhoused people dropped their anchors in Marin County.
Along the way, Kloc discovers the quiet beauty of the world the anchor-outs built: how they’ve learned to care for each other, band together to fend off real estate developers and NIMBY neighbors, and fight for a way of life that is entirely unrecognizable to those on shore. Lost at Sea explores the often overlooked world of poverty and homelessness that exists in even the wealthiest enclaves of America, where people who have fallen on hard times struggle to rebuild their lives among those who would rather just wish them away.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Kloc debuts with an enthralling account of the anchor-outs, an impoverished boat-dwelling community in Sausalito, Calif., and their battle with the city's wealthy coastal residents over their right to remain there. The anchor-out community originated after the Great Earthquake of 1906, Kloc explains, but he focuses his narrative on the perilous period from 2015 to 2024 when the 250-vessel-strong community faced increasing evictions. The pressure eventually led some anchor-outs to move ashore into a tent encampment which was later forcibly relocated by the city to a "muddy lot" next to "a boat-crushing yard" where "the boats being crushed were the very homes... they had been evicted from." Kloc takes aim at the casual cruelty of a city bureaucracy that slow-walked state-ordered zoning changes while it targeted the anchor-outs as "freeloaders," and which used environmental concerns ("polluting the water with feces and trash") to justify the anchor-outs' removal, even as "hundreds of thousands of gallons of Marin County sewage" had been "leaked" into the bay over the preceding decades, according to one environmental report. Kloc contextualizes the anchor-outs' struggle as one against monied interests that have long dominated the San Francisco region via forced removal and eviction, and offers vivid portraits of the charming and welcoming anchor-outs themselves—among them a 91-year-old who lived on poet Shel Silverstein's former boat and "a self-taught anchorage lawyer" who tried to defend the community—without shying away from reporting on the community's endemic violence and poverty. It's an evocative portrait of America at the fringes.
