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 years in Los Angeles, where she reported on California politics and the criminal legal system. Her writing on housing, migration, state violence, and the death penalty has appeared in a range of publications, including The New Republic, New York, and The Drift. For the NYR Online, she has written about, among other subjects, the Global Sumud Flotilla, the relationship between labor unions and migrant workers in Los Angeles, and Trump’s family separation policies.
I emailed French this summer to ask her about the antigrowth movement, Proposition 13, hippies, and making a living in long-form journalism.
Maggie McGowan:Marin County classifies the “anchor-outs” as homeless. It seems safe to say that that classification best serves the people who live on land and who want the anchor-outs to go elsewhere. Many of the anchor-outs Joe Kloc meets would not describe themselves that way. Is there an alternative to “homeless” or “unhoused” that could better represent their situation, perhaps to their advantage?
Piper French: This isn’t a municipal categorization, but I’m partial to the painter Jean Varda’s take on the hippies who lived on houseboats in Sausalito in the 1960s—the proto-anchor-outs. In his cousin Agnès Varda’s short film Uncle Yanco, which I discuss in the piece, Jean says his neighbors are “not the sort of rebels who carry pistols—they are rebels against the system, against this American obsession with making money.” I think there is something constitutionally rebellious about the way the anchor-outs live, or lived. They refuse to abide by bourgeois values; they’re renegades who live by a unique code and participate in a sharing economy (not unlike the veteran ravers in Oliver Laxe’s recent film Sirāt—though it doesn’t go too well for them, either). During happier days, they described their community as a “society gumbo,” but they also call it the “washing machine” and the “war zone.” Some of these descriptions are a bit inscrutable, but they’re all more meaningful than “homeless.”
The Sausalito “Hill People”—those lucky enough to afford houses on land—frequently cite environmental concerns to justify evicting the anchor-outs. As you write, these concerns may not always be in good faith. But as climate change displaces more and more people—as it did after the 2025 LA wildfires—a balance between a (genuine) environmentalism and an effective approach to the housing crisis seems only more urgent. What do you think such a balance might look like?
I don’t doubt that Marinites are genuinely concerned about their natural environment. But the focus on the anchor-outs’ relatively modest contribution to bay pollution is indicative of a broader tendency, by no means unique to Marin County, to blame homeless people for everything that goes wrong. A few years back in LA, for instance, the county governing body voted to ban the unhoused from certain high-fire areas, arguing that they were contributing to brush fires. Of course there is a fire risk associated with sleeping rough, but most encampment fires start in dense neighborhoods like Skid Row. It’s arguably a much bigger problem that wealthy homeowners build homes in the remotest reaches of the Santa Monica mountains, on land that is fated to burn, and burns more fiercely the more you try to stifle it—and then keep rebuilding even when those homes fall prey to the next wildfire.
This isn’t entirely the fault of the very rich, either: California’s ever-sprawling population has spurred new suburban development in rural areas that are especially fire prone. The state legislature has tried to solve this conundrum by allowing greater density in urban zones, but these bills tend to require that only a small percentage of new, high-density housing be truly affordable, which will not alleviate the housing crisis. Regardless, the dangers of living in the foothills have been illustrated in horrifying fashion by the wholesale destruction of Altadena and the Palisades; those fires were an environmental disaster whose fallout we’ll be reckoning with for decades to come—and the outrageous price gouging and opportunistic land grabs that occurred in the aftermath certainly show that cities need firmer regulations in place to prevent this sort of vulture capitalism.
You wrote about Marin County for the NYR Online three years ago, when locals, citing environmental concerns, opposed a development that was designed, at least in part, to respond to Marin’s housing crisis. In that essay you argue that “the crisis is not, of course, unique to Marin, but it’s particularly palpable on the soil from which the first seeds of the antigrowth movement sprouted.” What about Marin County made it such fertile soil for the antigrowth movement? Is Marin’s hostility toward the anchor-outs an offshoot of this movement?
Anyone who’s had the pleasure of spending time in Marin knows how beautiful it is—there’s a reason people always reach for celestial metaphors. After the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, it was also as little as fifteen minutes from the heart of a world-class city. Unsurprisingly, there was a massive population explosion in the postwar era, and that led to the start of the antigrowth movement.
It has always seemed a little ironic to me that amid this bastion of natural preservation, you have this massive prison complex, San Quentin, sitting atop some of California’s most valuable “waterfront property.” When I first heard about the proposal to convert a parcel of the prison land into an affordable housing complex, to take advantage of the fact that state land is exempt from certain requirements that often serve to throw sand in the gears of new development, it seemed like a perfect nexus of phenomena from which to explore land use battles in the state. The insanely high valuation of most land in Marin County and locals’ reluctance to countenance new development have led to these acrobatic maneuvers—converting a former gun range where prison guards would do target practice into apartment buildings for teachers! At the same time, Marin’s reputation as an affluent and lily-white enclave leads people to interpret any resistance to new development as classic NIMBYism—even though another case I looked at where locals opposed new housing, in historically black Marin City, arguably had more to do with fear about gentrification and displacement.
That being said, I don’t think the hostility toward the anchor-outs is something unique to Marin. If anything, they were perhaps afforded slightly more tolerance because they were seen as a curio.
One of the anchor-outs tells Kloc that many of Sausalito’s landlubber residents were once part of “the Haight-Ashbury scene, the Summer of Love scene, the houseboat scene,” but in the Eighties and Nineties they moved on, “first financially and then ideologically.” The ex-hippie-turned-square-turned-Reagan-voter is a fairly familiar trope, probably one without much explanatory power. But it is striking that California homeowners’ “tax revolt” began just a few years after the Summer of Love. (It’s striking, too, that the anchor-out tells Kloc, “Every Judas has been a real estate agent.”) Is there any connection between the two?
I love the Judas line. My guess is that the anchor-outs, or at least some of them, see real estate agents’ commodification of the land as a betrayal of the values of California’s earlier inhabitants and contrary to their whole ethos. (Their decision to opt out by living on the water instead is bedeviling to authorities in part because it seems like they’re getting away with something.)
I think there are both material and cultural reasons for the shift you describe. The tax revolt was a successful attempt by a small group of ideologues to capitalize on people’s justifiable anger at the cost-of-living crisis that followed the war in Vietnam, along with California’s runaway home prices. One hugely consequential victory of this movement was 1978’s Proposition 13, a public subsidy for homeowners that increases the longer you stay put (it dialed back home value assessments to 1975 values, and limited tax increases to one percent of that assessed value, plus inflation, going forward, seriously hollowing out the state’s tax base). Californians are still living in the society Proposition 13 made: the state used to have some of the best-resourced public schools in the country, and now it doesn’t.
I think Marin’s trajectory perfectly encapsulates some of the foreclosed possibilities of the 1960s. The astonishing social movements of the decade—particularly the black freedom struggle and the antiwar movement—could have produced a more durable sense of solidarity and collective possibilities. But there was very real and concentrated state repression against the more militant aspects and members of these movements. In fact, in 1972 Angela Davis was tried for allegedly participating in an effort to free the imprisoned black radical writer George Jackson at the Marin County Superior Court.
On the other hand, a lot of hippies turned inward, toward spiritualism and self-improvement. This can all veer very quickly into kooky right-wing territory, as we’ve seen with the MAHA movement more recently, which definitely has its hooks deep into the moms of Marin County. In the essay, I recommend Emmett Grogan’s book Ringolevio because—for all his fabulism—Grogan is quite clear-eyed about the narcissism and self-interest of the hippies. The passage about the group of hippies going out to the pueblo and giving the Native kids LSD and hooking up on the tribe’s sacred ground until they get run off is priceless. Reading Ringolevio gave me a better appreciation for how that shift into the 1980s transpired—and how it perhaps wasn’t such a stretch as it might appear. People looking back at the 1960s tend to assume everyone was sort of equally aligned against the system, but alongside the committed student and black and antiwar radicals, there were always a lot of people who just wanted to get high and listen to good music (forgivable!).The counterculture became the culture—and by the 1980s the thing to do was make piles of money off the stock market. (We saw this again in 2020 and beyond—how resolutely people took up the mantle of protest against the police, and then how casually most of those who aren’t personally affected by abusive policing have shrugged it off again.)
Your essay concludes with a reflection on the financial difficulties that come with working in print journalism. Do you have any advice to young writers? How do you navigate the steadily shrinking world of long-form journalism?
I hesitate to give generalized advice because the industry has contracted substantially just in the few years I’ve been in it, and I don’t think it’s a matter of following the right steps anymore, if it ever was. I would, however, strongly suggest spending time doing other sorts of work. The piecemeal and in some cases very bad jobs that I had throughout my twenties—waiting tables, bartending, canvassing, working with asylum seekers and farmworkers, contact tracing during the pandemic—have greatly informed my writing and reporting. They have also made me appreciate it more. Long-form journalism is absurdly labor-intensive, it can be personally demoralizing, and there’s even something depressing about succeeding to whatever meager extent in an industry that’s collapsing around you. I carry my memories of the work I did before as a reminder that it’s a gift to get to spend my days reading widely, talking to interesting people from all sorts of backgrounds, and trying to make sense of the world.
I do think cultivating close editorial relationships is one of the most important things you can do as a young writer. That sort of community is essential when you’re independent, and it’s helpful to be able to frankly discuss money and how people are making it—or not. (Recently The Baffler ran a forum on writers and their side hustles; on the Substack “How I Make Money Writing,” writers talk openly about their finances to help demystify the economics of media work.) I do also recommend not living in New York. I live here at the moment, but I’m glad I didn’t move here right after college, and I don’t think it’s the only place in the world to be. Finally, there’s really no way around it: you have to get good at living without spending too much and ideally figure out how to go about making your life rich in nonmonetary ways. It can be done!