Home for sailing.
California may have missed the total eclipse, but a impressive ferry A sight of a different kind awaited those scanning San Francisco Bay earlier this week: a two-story, wood-shingled house being towed across the water.
The surreal situation is the result of a years-long legal battle between a once-vibrant community of houseboat residents and the government of Redwood City, a Silicon Valley suburb of 80,000 people south of San Francisco.
“The thing is ready to sink.” It 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 cruise ship district.
The situation that led to the house crossing the bay began in 2015, when homeowners near Docktown filed a lawsuit with the city, claiming the marina was illegal.
A mess of eviction efforts, settlements and other lawsuits followed, with the state ultimately declaring that houseboat residents could not reside in Docktown and that the city would have to move their homes, according to SFGATE.
Attorney Ted Hannig, an alleged boating and sailing enthusiast who led the original lawsuit and who still resides across the water from Docktown, did not respond to request for comment of the Standard.
Once home to more than 100 people, there were only nine residents left in July 2023.
Stancil says he is now the last resident of Docktown, which one resident 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 or expenses “.
The mansion seen heading north across the bay was the penultimate barge of the successfully decimated nabe.
It was privately towed from Redwood City to Tony Sausalito in Marin County, north of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge — a two-day journey that was still underway as of Monday afternoon, the U.S. Coast Guard confirmed at SFGATE.
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