Home for sail.
California may have mostly missed out on the total eclipse, but a ferry impressive sight of another kind awaited those peering out onto the San Francisco Bay earlier this week: A two-story wood-shingled home being towed across the water.
The surreal situation was the result of a years-long legal battle between a once-vibrant community of houseboat residents and the government of Redwood City, an 80,000-person Silicon Valley suburb south of San Francisco.
“The thing’s ready to sink. That was the biggest houseboat they had in Redwood City,” Edward Stancil told the San Francisco Standard of the floating home, once part of Redwood City’s Docktown Marina neighborhood of live-aboards.
The situation that led to the dwelling being floated across the Bay started back in 2015, when homeowners near Docktown filed a lawsuit with the city claiming the marina was illegal.
A mess of eviction efforts, settlements and further lawsuits followed, with the state eventually declaring that houseboat residents could not reside in Docktown, and the city must relocate their homes, according to SFGATE.
Attorney Ted Hannig, a purported lover of boating and sailing who led the original suit and still resides across the water from Docktown, did not respond to the Standard’s request for comment.
Once over 100-people strong, only nine denizens reportedly remained by July 2023.
Stancil says he is now the final resident of Docktown, which one inhabitant once described to ABC7 as being “Like a little island — a little oasis in the middle of Silicon Valley where you don’t feel the pressure and the expense.”
The abode seen making its way north through the Bay was the second-to-last houseboat of the successfully decimated nabe.
It was privately towed from Redwood City toward tony Sausalito in Marin County, north of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge — a two-day journey which was still underway Monday afternoon, the US Coast Guard confirmed to SFGATE.
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