Lost at Sea: Poverty and Paradise Collide at the Edge of America
Joe Kloc. Dey Street, $32.50 (272p) ISBN 978-0-06-306169-9
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. (Apr.)
Details
Reviewed on: 02/03/2025
Genre: Nonfiction
Compact Disc - 979-8-8748-7957-0
MP3 CD - 979-8-8748-7958-7
Other - 272 pages - 978-0-06-306171-2