cover image Lost at Sea: Poverty and Paradise Collide at the Edge of America

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.)