Top image: Photo via Southern Marin Fire Protection District

Funny lady Chloe Fineman, who is a fairly active content creator on Instagram, was in the Bay Area recently enjoying a Scadinavian-style sauna that's set up right on a floating dock in Sausalito.

The place is called Fjord, and it's apparently gotten quite a bit of social media traction since Fineman says in the video, "I've wanted to do this since the day I saw it on Instagram!"

She adds, in the caption, "This is why I love the Bay Area!!!!"

The video shows as she and her friends enjoy a hot sauna while floating on Richardson Bay, and then dive into the Bay itself for a cold plunge — which she is hesitant to do at first, but not after a good long hot spell in the sauna.

Fineman appears to have been back in her native Bay Area for the holidays, while SNL is on its December/January hiatus.

In case you weren't aware, Fineman was born in Berkeley and attended Piedmont High School — where she was a champion in the school's famous annual bird-calling contest, which led her to an appearance on Late Night With David Letterman that you can see below.

If you're intrigued about the sauna, it seems like Fjord books up fast. February bookings were made available on January 1, and it doesn't look like any shared or private sessions are available, and even the waitlist appears to be full?

Sessions for March go online for reservations on February 1 at 9 am. See more info here.

A famous waterfront hangout in Marin County that boasted plenty of celebrity guests in the 1970s — and where Robin Williams once worked as a busboy — has shut its doors for the second time in 45 years.

The Trident, which spent the 80s, 90s and aughts as Horizons Restaurant, but which reopened as The Trident over a decade ago, has closed its doors, likely for good. As the Chronicle reports, The Trident went out with a New Year's Eve bang, and owner Bob Freeman says that with declining tourist traffic in Sausalito, it was simply time to go.

Freeman was reportedly in talks to sell the restaurant, which fell through, and selling the building is complicated by the fact that its parking lot is owned by the City of Sausalito, to whom any future owner would have to pay rent.

A fine-dining restaurant that took over the Trident's upstairs space in 2023, Ditas, closed its doors last June.

The Trident, which opened as a music venue and bohemian, organic restaurant owned by famed folk group The Kingston Trio in 1966, is legendary for being a hangout of Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, Joan Baez, Clint Eastwood, Bill Graham, and The Rolling Stones.

Cocktail legend has it that bartender Bobby Lazoff made a Tequila Sunrise for Keith Richards, and Richards then proceeded to help popularize the drink while the band was touring the country — Lazoff and cowrker Billy Rice can be said to have invented the modern version of the drink, but they took the name from a cocktail actually invented at the Arizona Biltmore hotel in the 1930s, which was made with lime juice and creme de cassis, not OJ and grenadine.

After that came The Eagles' hit "Just Another Tequila Sunrise," and Jose Cuervo started using the recipe to sell more tequila, the drink took its place among the pantheon of 70s party favorites.

The Trident and the Sausalito Historical Society commemorated the (roughly) 50th anniversary of Richards and his first Tequila Sunrise with an event and commemorative plaque dedication at the restaurant in 2023.

Freeman reopened The Trident in 2012, after the original had shut down in 1980, but it never regained any glimmer of its former reputation or prestige. Still, it is one of the first spots drivers see as they drive into Sausalito, and it remained a reliable brunch destination, and continued serving up Tequila Sunrises and Irish Coffees until the end.

A long-running neighborhood feud in Sausalito over a home remodel and an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) has escalated into heated arguments, police calls, restraining orders, viral videos, and accusations from both sides.

Chronicle columnist Emily Hoeven has the full details on the saga: In 2017, Jake Beyer and Georgia Glassie bought a 1920s cottage and, in 2021, proposed a major remodel — adding a third story and an ADU under California’s housing laws encouraging new units. Despite multiple community meetings and design revisions, neighbors pushed back over blocked views and concerns about neighborhood character.

The Sausalito Planning Commission approved the project in late 2023, but the City Council reversed that decision in early 2024 after a tense meeting, requiring design changes including removal of rear decks and additional neighbor consultations. As the Pacific Sun reported last year, Beyer said he was “confused and disappointed by the lack of clarity” in the council’s decision, hinting at possible legal action.

Architect Michael Rex criticized Sausalito’s planning process as inconsistent, pointing to staff turnover and unclear code interpretations. “The department interpreted the code willy-nilly for this project,” he told the Pacific Sun. “The applicant was not instructed correctly.”

As the Chronicle reports, tensions spilled beyond City Hall, with police called twice to local businesses over altercations involving Beyer and neighbors — once about a thrown food item, and another over a middle finger allegedly directed at the couple’s children.

The dispute also played out online with competing Google reviews and heated posts on neighborhood forums. Beyer and Glassie produced a slick, documentary-style video and website to share their perspective.

Tensions continued at parks and community events, with accusations including spitting and intimidation. The couple says they faced harassment, were followed and filmed without consent, and reported dozens of incidents to authorities. Neighbors say they felt unsafe as well, leading to several restraining orders being filed — most of which were denied.

The Chronicle writes that in March 2024, the City Council unanimously approved a revised version of the project, calling for compromise and including changes such as larger setbacks and removal of decks.

Later that year, Beyer and Glassie sent open letters to Governor Newsom and state housing officials, accusing Sausalito of misapplying local codes to limit their ADU’s size. The city attorney disputed this, saying the couple chose a smaller unit to preserve backyard space.

By then raising four children, the couple argued that state housing laws allowed them to build a larger ADU without extra city review. State officials found no violation, though some housing advocates disagreed.

As the Chronicle reports, the main remodel eventually moved forward with approval in 2025. The couple later applied to restore the full ADU size but say the city unfairly delayed their application.

This dispute highlights the deep challenges Sausalito faces around housing reform. Despite state mandates and urgent affordable housing needs, local opposition remains strong, complicating projects like this.

Contributor’s Note: The original version of this post too closely matched the tone of the Chronicle article. We have revised it to better attribute the original reporting. We regret this oversight and sincerely thank the Chronicle for their thorough coverage.

Image: Screenshot via Vimeo

A well-known environmental research vessel sank Sunday evening while docked in the Oakland Estuary. No one was onboard, and firefighters worked to contain the nearly 400 gallons of diesel that was onboard.

As the Chronicle reports, the Kaisei, a large double-masted replica ship operated by the Ocean Voyages Institute in Sausalito, began sinking around 6 p.m. near the 2500 block of Blanding Avenue in Alameda. Witnesses on land saw the vessel partially submerged and alerted authorities, according to US Coast Guard spokesperson Petty Officer Kenneth Wiese.

Crews from both Alameda and Oakland fire departments responded, including a fireboat, and worked to stabilize the scene. As NBC Bay Area reports, the ship had begun pulling part of the dock down with it, and responders cut the mooring lines to prevent further structural damage, according to Alameda Fire Department Public Information Officer Kevin Tidwell.

The Kaisei, which was not occupied at the time of the incident, has since settled on the estuary floor. Firefighters deployed a floating boom around the wreck to contain a visible sheen of leaking fuel, as reported by ABC7. The vessel is believed to have contained up to 400 gallons of diesel onboard, Wiese said.

A person reached at a number associated with the Kaisei Project told theSan Francisco Chronicle they believed “something hit” the vessel, though the exact cause of the sinking remains under investigation. Officials with the Coast Guard and other agencies are monitoring the situation and coordinating next steps, which could involve salvage or removal depending on the assessment of the ship’s condition.

The Kaisei is a modern replica of a traditional Japanese training vessel and serves as the flagship for the Ocean Voyages Institute’s cleanup missions. The nonprofit has operated out of Sausalito since 1979 and launched the Kaisei Project to remove plastic waste and marine debris from the Pacific, including three expeditions to the North Pacific Garbage Patch.

Based on a Reddit post from five years ago, it appears that the Kaisei was routinely docked in Alameda between expeditions:

The Kaisei currently docked in Alameda. The brigantine is currently operated by Ocean Voyages Institute as the figurehead and expedition ship of "Project Kaisei" which is an international program dedicated to implementing solutions to the problem of marine debris.
byu/carnegiehall insailing

The ship’s sinking has raised concern among environmental advocates, given its symbolic role in ocean preservation. Authorities are urging anyone with information about what may have caused the vessel’s damage to contact the U.S. Coast Guard.

Top image via the Ocean Voyages Institute

Sausalito and Marin County leaders have been dealing with the issue of less-than-seaworthy — and potentially polluting — boats, some with otherwise unhoused people living on them, for a number of years. But things really came to a head in the pandemic, and one confrontation ended with the harbormaster getting bear-sprayed.

The incident happened in July 2020, and as the Marin Independent Journal reported, Harbormaster Curtis Havel approached the boat of then 30-year-old Kimberly Susan Slater, who was living on the anchor-out in Richardson Bay. Around 11 am on a Tuesday morning, Havel went to deliver a package of information to Slater, as he was to other boats in the anchorage, and after he apparently bumped her boat, Slater bear-sprayed him in the face, apparently emptying an entire can to do so.

Last month, a jury acquitted Slater of felony assault, finding her guilty instead of misdemeanor assault and delaying a public officer.

Slater's defense attorney argued that Havel had not followed proper procedure to alert Slater of his presence outside the boat, while the prosecutors argued that Slater knew exactly who Havel was, and acted out of anger over the ongoing situation with anchor-outs in the Bay. Havel was, in fact, delivering a packet of information about the county's intention to evict the boat-dwellers and remove derelict vessels.

Slater, now 34, was sentenced Wednesday to probation and to 100 hours of community service. As Bay Area News Group reports, Marin County Judge Kevin Murphy also ordered Slater to take an anger-management course.

During her sentencing, prosecutors noted that Slater had not shown any remorse, and that she continued to use social media to encourage other anchor-outs to "resist" the Richardson Bay Regional Agency and other law enforcement authorities trying to evict them.

Havel testified at the trial, and told the jury that Slater remained illegally anchored in the Bay, five years after this incident.

"I feel angry, I feel hurt, I feel abandoned by a system I spent my career believing in," Havel testified, per Bay Area News Group.

Havel, who became harbormaster in 2019, resigned from the job in 2021 not long after one of these anchor-out boats exploded in Richardson Bay, injuring its sole occupant. That boat, which was not seaworthy, had likely exploded due to propane leaking into its bilge, which got ignited by a spark, Havel said at the time.

Photo via Richardson Bay Marina

Image: Joe Kukura, SFist

The owner of a 39-unit apartment building in Sausalito is evicting literally everyone in order to renovate the place and jack up the rents, even giving a 93-year-old woman notice that she has to be out in two months.

There is some noticeable difference between what's presented on the website of the Sausalito apartment complex Portofino Riviera, and the reality of what the place actually looks like. The website shows a group of gorgeous homes along Sausalito’s famed coastline. But the video report below from KTVU shows the building as far more ragged, with the “Por” missing from the Portofino Riviera sign, and the detail that one tenant had to be moved out because their unit was “flooded by malfunctioning gutters.”

So it may sound like nice news that the landlord is renovating the whole place. But it’s much less nice that they’ve posted notice to evict the tenants of all 93 units of the building. Per KTVU, last week each unit had an eviction notice taped to its door, demanding the tenants be out by October 31.

One of these tenants is 93 years old, and wearing a neck brace from a severe injury and suffering from hypertension. "I don't know where to get the rent from, where to go, what to do, how to handle it," that tenant Ursula Goldstone told KTVU.

And that rent is heading for a significant increase. KTVU notes that the complex is now offering these same units for “$2,600 for a studio and $3,700 for a one-bedroom,” despite that no renovations have taken place.

The tenant who experienced the flooding in their apartment was relocated to a smaller apartment (though at the same rent), and is now looking at the prospect of having to move twice within a year. “Hopefully, we can stay in the same school,” that tenant Elaina Gunn told the station. “You know, the protections here are not what they are in the city" of San Francisco.

KTVU notes that “Some residents have hired legal representation,” and it’s unclear whether they’ve all retained the same attorney, or whether different tenants have hired multiple attorneys. Either way, that legal representation’s first move is likely a delay on the evictions, so it may just be the beginning of this saga.

Related: 81-Year-Old Woman Being Evicted From Upper Haight Condo Hits Back With Lawsuit. [SFist]

Image: Google Street View

The YIMBY crowd is unleashing their lawsuits on cities whose Housing Elements are not yet approved by the state, and in the case of an impending Marin County lawsuit, claiming that some proposed housing sites are literally “in the water.”

Here in San Francisco, the year-plus drama over passing the state-mandated Housing Element — a long-range planning document related to housing — was finally resolved in late January with a successfully approved plan that the state OK’ed at the deadline’s 11th hour. That state required that SF submit a plan to build 82,000 new housing units by the year 2031, and had we not gotten the plan approved in time, we’d have been subject to potentially losing billions in state funding, a range of other legal and financial consequences, plus the much-discussed “builder’s remedy” that would have allowed developers to just build whatever they pleased without regard for zoning or city approvals.

But hundreds of California cities did not get their Housing Elements approved by the state’s February 1 deadline. One of these is Marin County’s Sausalito, who did not even manage to submit their plan to the state until February 28, about a full month past the deadline. The state now has 60 days to approve it (and they generally render a decision more quickly than 60 days). But until that plan is approved by the state, Sausalito is out-of-compliance on paper and potentially subject to the above-referenced legal consequences and “builder’s remedy.”  

And here come those legal consequences, apparently. The Chronicle reports that YIMBY Law is insisting they will sue the City of Sausalito, with developers named in their suit claiming that sites Sausalito identified are “unsuitable for development” or even “mostly underwater.”

Though we should note a few issues with that Chronicle report. It’s an opinion piece (not marked as such on the Chronicle's home page), with very subtle labeling of “Opinion” in the top-left corner of the report and in the URL, if anyone reads URLs. Moreover, the lawsuit is still theoretical — the Chronicle notes that “By Wednesday, YIMBY Law plans to announce a lawsuit against Sausalito,” which doesn’t even necessarily mean they’re going to file it this week. The article gets comment from the pro-development group YIMBY Law and an interested real estate developer Home3 Inc. Sausalito’s city manager is given the opportunity to comment, but only from the difficult position of not even having seen any of the legal claims of a lawsuit that has not even been filed yet.

In other words, this lawsuit story seems to be fed to the Chronicle as an exclusive, with knowledge its claims would generate supportive, uncritical coverage for the plaintiffs. The article’s author has been retweeting YIMBY tweets all day since the piece was published.  

There may be some credible claims in this still-unfiled lawsuit. It quotes one resident as saying their property was included as a potential development site “without any contact with me, and without any notice period or hearing.” But the claim that some sites are “mostly underwater” deserves a little scrutiny.

One site that Home3 claims “has a significant portion in the water” is seen above, 100 Spinnaker Drive. Yes, there’s water there, but otherwise it's a restaurant parking lot where a structure could theoretically be built. That restaurant remains open, so there may be real issues with the landowner’s willingness to build housing there. Other potential houseboat sites Sausalito identifies in their Housing Element may also have their own feasability issues. But to characterize these sites as a Spongebob cartoon environment would be inaccurate.

Sausalito is certainly a pricey area that, and like much of Marin County, is not keen to see tiers of more affordable housing built there. But it’s hard to imagine that developers want to see housing stock there become more affordable, either. And since Sausalito’s housing element is not approved by the state, they could end up on the hook for legal fees when groups like YIMBY Law or developers sue them. That creates an incentive for more of these lawsuits, as the plaintiffs can figure that in many cases, local governments will have to pay their attorney fees, and they won’t worry about ending up financially underwater.

Related: ‘California’s Richest City’ In Marin Could Get Its First-Ever Mixed-Income Housing, Though It Doesn't Look Too Affordable [SFist]

Image: Squirrel 22 via Wikimedia Commons

A space above the storied Trident restaurant and bar, which played host to Janis Joplin, Bill Graham, and the Rolling Stones in the 1960s, has transformed into a new fine-dining spot that opens this spring, from a pair of Delhi-based restaurateurs.

The owners of Ditas — a popular restaurant with locations in Mumbai and Delhi — Udita and Utsav Khaitan, are expanding to the U.S., starting with this first American outpost in Sausalito. CEO of Ditas Marin Nikita Khandheria has brought on chef Aiki Terashima — formerly of Picazo Cafe in Sonoma and Morimoto Napa — to create an upscale, international menu that will lean toward Japan and Italy for influences.

Eater reported last month on the arrival Ditas, first scheduled for an early February opening. But Khandheria now tells SFist that the restaurant is only in friends-and-family mode for at least the next month, though it appears renovations are complete.

The new restaurant has taken over what was formerly an event space for The Trident, and it's been reimagined by Winder Gibson Architects and interior designer Maureen Kelse.

"Chef [Terashima] wants to be sure that every dish is the absolute best that it can be before we open to the public," Khandheria said, adding that the grand opening would likely be after March 15.

Ditas Marin currently does not have a website or publicly posted menu, and Khandheria said that the menus at the two locations in India will not be mirrored here. She said that the Mumbai and Delhi restaurants were more focused on "fair food," and the Sausalito restaurant would be more fine-dining focused. An Instagram post for Ditas Marin says it promises to be "an elegant restaurant by day and an exclusive bar by night."

Chef Terashima apprenticed as a sushi chef with Iron Chef Morimoto at his Napa restaurant, and in 2017 he opened The Reel Fish Shop and Grill in downtown Sonoma. Sonoma Mag described him expertly butchering a 150-pound tuna for the restaurant — taking a whole-fish approach in the kitchen, which he made a habit of at The Reel.

While The Trident lives on as a casual seafood restaurant downstairs — somewhat divorced from its rock-and-roll roots and with some decidedly mixed Yelp reviews — it sounds like it will be a far more fancy experience upstairs at Ditas.

The Trident began life as The Yacht Dock, and was bought in 1960 by music legends the Kingston Trio. They, in turn, attracted plenty of the San Francisco music scene of the 60s to the place, including regular customer Janis Joplin — who had her own table — Jerry Garcia, Joan Baez, Clint Eastwood, and Bill Graham, who threw parties there for the Rolling Stones whenever they were in town. The place was also used for a scene in Woody Allen's 1972 film Play It Again, Sam.

After a couple decades as Horizons restaurant starting in 1980s, the space on the water in Sausalito was re-christened as The Trident in 2012, and has continued chugging along ever since.

A new advertising fail from Uber tries to localize to SF, but the campaign uses an image from the wrong city, showing Sausalito in a shot that purports to be the Marina District.

You can see why Uber would launch a localized advertising campaign at San Francisco International Airport — jet-lagged and bedraggled travelers would surely be keen for the quickest and easiest way out of their airport drudgery, and off to destinations and attractions in, say, the Mission, the Embarcadero, or the Marina District. But Redditors and Twitter users are having a field day with Uber’s current SFO kiosk ads, a "localized" ad campaign that clearly shows a lack of local knowledge.

Let’s focus on the large image to the left above, which says “See you in Marina District.” But that photo is not of the Marina District, it is a photo of Sausalito, some seven miles to the north of the Marina.  

A Wednesday Reddit post mocking the ads also takes Uber to task with SF’s famously fussy pickiness when it comes to how locals prefer to grammatically use prepositions and definite articles like “the” and “in.” And while this is not a major error, anyone who speaks San Franciscan knows that if you use the phrases “in Marina District,” “at the Mission,” and “at Embarcadero,” well, that’s three strikes right there at sounding like a local. Still, most of the ridicule is coming over the Sausalito houseboat picture for the Marina.

Another tweet dated November 22 shows the campaign has been at SFO since around Thanksgiving, though the social media peanut galleries are just noticing it now.

But are the peanut galleries on Reddit and Twitter sure they are correct when they say it’s Sausalito, and not the Marina? SFist isolated the image part of the advertisement, seen above, and did a reverse image search to determine the location of the shot.

Our search took us to a stock image called “Floating homes of Sausalito, San Francisco” on the subscription service Adobe Stock Images. While there seems to be some filtering work done to Uber’s version of the image, the similarities are otherwise uncanny. The position of the the three visible boats, and the items atop them, are exactly the same. Light reflections on the houseboats shot the exact same dimensions. The reflections on the water are the same on both images.

Yes, there are boats docked in San Francisco’s Marina District, but certainly hot Sausalito-style houseboats of this caliber. San Francisco does have some houseboats at Mission Creek, which is completely on the other side of town, but they are not as numerous or congregated together as what is depicted on Uber’s advertisement.

People are rightfully giving Uber some guff over this, given that the company is based in San Francisco, so maybe someone ought to have caught this. In reality, the ad campaign was probably sourced out to some third-party agency. And many special media commenters are speculating this campaign may have been created by some sort of AI chatbot mechanism. Which may be so, but it seems the AI chatbot may have done this campaign after knocking back a few AI cocktails.

Related: Uber's Half-Billion-Dollar Marketing Campaign Reportedly Hasn't Helped Its Reputation [SFist]

Image: @emeyerson via Twitter

Sausalito managed to clear a sprawling encampment in Marinship Park this month that had been growing more unsanitary and problematic over the last two years, but they did it via a court settlement that included cash payments.

There's already been plenty of tweeting to the effect of "Why doesn't San Francisco try this?!", but what the City of Sausalito just did to clear a city park of some 30 homeless residents seems like a pretty short-term, one-time solution.

As KRON4 reports, it was once a one-mile-long encampment in 2020. And later it consisted partly of unhoused individuals who had previously been living in the city's Dunphy Park — the usual venue for Sausalito's famed art festival and from which they were evicted last summer.

Six months ago, the city declared a state of emergency around the encampment following a fire there — though efforts to clear encampments in the city have previously been met with court injunctions. (A judge in March also affirmed one of the campers' rights to use his own tent and shade structure for two pet cats, rejecting a city order that he use one of their provided, tan-colored, REI tents — which sounds like it was an aesthetic issue.)

Earlier this month, the city finally reached a settlement with a group representing the campers, the Sausalito Homeless Union, agreeing to pay each qualifying camper a one-time $18,000 stipend to find alternative housing elsewhere. As the Chronicle earlier reported, the Sausalito Homeless Union will be responsible for distributing the funds, and providing a monthly accounting of their use to the city.

"The agreement is an innovative way to get people out of tents and into housing in advance of inclement weather," said City Manager Chris Zapata, speaking to KPIX. "It's the right thing to do."

And Sausalito Mayor Janelle Kellman said in a statement, "I am confident we have paved a humane course of action that allows each person's unique needs to be met. This agreement will allow us to help folks restore their lives in a way that is far more compassionate and safer than the unfortunate circumstance of living outdoors."

If all 30 people qualify for the grants, the settlement will cost the city $540,000. The city says that it has already incurred $1.5 million in unanticipated costs related to the encampment, including legal fees, sanitation, and management.

The Sausalito Homeless Union had sued the city on behalf of the encampment's residents — the latest in two years of legal battles over homelessness and where to humanely allow people to exist in the small, bayside city. An earlier battle had been waged over boat dwellers (or "anchor-outs" in adjacent Richardson Bay, whose boats were deemed hazards by the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which began enforcing 72-hour anchorage rules — rules these boat dwellers couldn't abide by because their boats were non-operational, in many cases. Some of those people ended up in Dunphy Park, and then, Marinship Park.

Since February 2021, tent-dwellers were forced to remain in a fenced, sanctioned area on the tennis courts, and the city was ticketing residents who tried camping outside of that area. As Pacific Sun reported last year, the nonprofit Urban Alchemy that managed several of San Francisco's sanctioned tent camps was managing the site, and residents made anonymous complaints that alleged misconduct by Urban Alchemy staff including drug use and sexual harassment.

The park and its adjacent tennis courts now have to be cleaned and tested for public-health hazards before they can be reopened to the public, and KRON4 notes that no cleanup plan has yet been finalized.

Oakland faces a similar, though much larger-scale problem with the sprawling Wood Street encampment in West Oakland. With some of the encampment existing on Caltrans property, and following a steady stream of fires there including two on Tuesday this week, Caltrans ordered the camp cleared and began the process of evicting people in mid-July. That effort was met with a court injunction, and a federal judge gave Caltrans and the City of Oakland until tomorrow, August 26, to provide a relocation plan for the 300 or so people living at the encampment.

Previously: Sausalito Declares Emergency Over Encampment Fire

Top image: Google Street View ca. April 2019

Photo: Cedric Letsch

Dunphy Park had typically been home to kayakers and an outdoor art festival, but the 35 unsheltered people who'd set up an encampment there were very unceremoniously given the boot early Tuesday morning.

It seemed not-very-Sausalito in late May when the rather exclusive Sausalito Arts Festival was cancelled because of a homeless encampment that had sprung up on the grounds of the host venue Dunphy Park. But it was really more of a “cause and effect” thing. People have been living on boats that weren’t particularly seaworthy for years at Sausalito's Richardson Bay, and when one of these blew up and sank in February, the fancy houseboat community declared they’d had enough.

A few dozen of the displaced former houseboaters encamped at Dunphy Park, much to the dismay of the Arts Festival and the city of Sausalito. The city issued a 72-hour notice to clear out on Friday, and at roughly 6 a.m. Tuesday morning they made good on the threat, and the Chronicle reports that the clearing of the encampment got pretty contentious.

“By 7:30 a.m., more officers arrived at the scene along with the bulldozer,” according to the Chronicle. “By 10 a.m., police were tossing the handmade signs into giant dumpsters. At least ten officers stationed themselves at different corners of the encampment as crews brought in fences. Residents of the camp began to shout at them, chanting ‘Shame on you, shame on blue.’”

Additional video from the scene shows protesters “going limp” and needing to be carried off by police, law enforcement closing off the area with newly installed fencing, and the coup de grâce, a bulldozer just plain bulldozing peoples’ possessions.

According to a release from the city, “All members of the encampment are being offered individual assistance in moving their camp equipment and personal belongings in a manner that is safe, compassionate, and respectful.” That is not consistent with what we saw today. The former residents are being offered space at the city’s “designated transitional site” at nearby Marinship Park (seen at the top of this post), but given today’s events, that transition seems unlikely to go smoothly.

Related: Sausalito's Famed Labor Day Art Festival Getting Canceled Over Homeless Encampment [SFist]

Image: City of Sausalito

An impasse over a homeless encampment in a downtown Sausalito park has led organizers of the city's annual art festival over Labor Day Weekend to say the festival is being canceled for the second year in a row.

COVID-19 restrictions aren't to blame for the fact that the Sausalito Art Festival isn't happening this year. But between a disagreement among residents and city leaders over the use of one waterfront park for the festival, and a delay in a decision by a federal judge over the possible relocation of a homeless encampment from one park to another, festival organizers say they have run out of time to make the event happen in September.

"In December of last year, one man erected a tent to live in on the Sausalito waterfront next to Dunphy Park," writes the Sausalito Art Festival Board of Trustees on the festival website. "Since then an entire encampment of homeless people has developed. Thereafter, the Sausalito City Council has been trying to relocate the homeless encampment from its central and prominent location near Dunphy Park to the less visible area of Marinship Park."

Marinship Park is where the festival is typically setup, according to a multiyear agreement with the city. At the moment, U.S. District Court Judge Edward M. Chen is still mulling a decision on whether the city should be allowed to physically relocate the encampment there, and the lack of a decision has led to the festival's cancellation, organizers say.

Simultaneously, there was pushback from residents and park commissioners over the temporary relocation of the festival to Dunphy Park.

"This situation is extremely difficult for everyone involved," the festival board says.

In a press release, Sausalito Art Festival Foundation Chairman Louis Briones says, "Unfortunately, we are simply out of time to work through the opposition voiced to the movement of the Festival to Dunphy Park." Briones explains that contingency plans were drawn up to host the festival in either Marinship or Dunphy Park, but but the needs for each park are "vastly different," Briones says. He adds that "the events industry is rapidly coming back to life and we can’t wait any longer to start ordering and reserving materials," and he says that the festival wants to release the artists planning to exhibit there so that they can make other exhibition plans for Labor Day.

Tensions surrounding homeless individuals and "anchor-outs" — people living on boats anchored in Richardson Bay — go back to pre-pandemic times. But the situation escalated last fall when a state agency, the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), began enforcing 72-hour anchorage rules in Richardson Bay. The agency had for years decried the environmental damage being done to the bay when these vessels — often inoperable and in states of extreme disrepair — frequently sank. And in February, one of these boats exploded and sank, likely due to a leaking propane tank, and the individual onboard was injured.

As the Pacific Sun reports, many of the unhoused individuals living in the tent city at Dunphy Park are displaced "anchor-outs" who were forced to give up their floating homes in recent months. In one photo published by the Pacific Sun, one of these people holds a protest sign about the Richardson’s Bay Regional Agency (RBRA) that has been reporting loitering boats saying "RBRA Terrorizing People."

Adding another layer of complication is the fact that Marinship Park, where the city hopes to relocate the encampment, is contaminated from a former boat-crushing operation there. As one activist and sometime resident of the camp tells the Pacific Sun, "Nobody from this camp is interested in going to Marinship."

According to a homelessness policy analyst with Marin County Health and Human Services, the county currently has about 500 individuals who have been assessed as qualified for supportive housing, however that housing doesn't exist and they are all on a waitlist. About 16 of them are residents of the Dunphy Park encampment.

Photo: Facebook