‘Society Gumbo’

In 1951 the San Francisco Chronicle wrote that “in Sausalito people live on anything that floats.” Those midcentury houseboat dwellers were the antecedents of Marin County’s “anchor-outs,” people who live on the anchorage in Richardson Bay and therefore, as Piper French writes in her review of Joe Kloc’s Lost at Sea in our September 24 issue, “outside the bounds of mainstream American life.” According to the county authorities and neighbors on dry land, the anchor-outs are also homeless, and their not-always-seaworthy vessels are a threat to the bay’s ecosystem. (“Locals are positively racked by anxiety over the fate of the bay’s eelgrass,” French writes.) “They spar with the harbormaster…weather storms and the pandemic, [and] get displaced to dry land,” but, as French points out, “Sausalito’s extreme shortage of truly affordable housing, and its unwillingness to construct any sort of shelter, means that the anchor-outs have little hope of staying in the county” if they leave their houseboats. “Whether we admit it to ourselves or not,” exile and disappearance are “the intended result of our standard approach to homelessness.”Before relocating to New York City, French lived for five...