A two-story house — actually a houseboat — was seen floating across San Francisco Bay during Monday's solar eclipse, and it captured the imagination of many who wondered where it had come from and where it was headed.
This fanciful looking, brown shingled houseboat was the last of community of houseboats that was evicted from Docktown at the Redwood City Marina. The collection of houseboats there was once home to over 100 people, as the Palo Alto Daily Post reported last fall, and Redwood City has been in a yearslong legal battle to remove the houseboats, saying that the community was illegally squatting on state land.
The city paid out over $1 million in settlements, and the houseboat everyone saw being towed across the Bay was the second to last still remaining at Docktown, as SFGate notes. It was being moved to Sausalito, where it docked on Tuesday at Commodore Marina, near the Richardson Bay Bridge.
The houseboat's arrival in Marin was delayed by some wind and tide conditions.
Sausalito resident Phil Hott, who knows a thing or two about houseboats, explains to NBC Bay Area why the houseboat arrived a half a day late on Tuesday, after spending the night floating in Richardson Bay.
"It was up a twisty channel, so you have to have the tide right and you have to come down without the wind blowing you into the bank," Hott tells the station. "These things are very heavy. Then it has to travel through the Bay. And the winds and the tide changes and the current is going out. You don’t want it to drag you out to the Golden Gate Bridge."
The image of the two-story, full-house-sized houseboat floating on open water reminded many of the Pixar film Up, just with horizontal movement instead of vertical.
The Docktown community in Redwood City had been a longstanding one, and as the houseboats left one by one over the last few years, longtime residents lamented to local media.
Edward Stancil, who had lived at Docktown since 1986, told ABC7 last year, "I just can't stand it because every day another boat goes out, another boat goes out. And it's just very sad to see affordable housing being crushed. You know?"
Stancil continued, "In my particular situation, I'm on a retirement income and it's not quite enough to rent a house in Silicon Valley. Every tenant that's still here doesn't want any money. We just want to stay."
Stancil, along with four other remaining Docktown residents, ended up being awarded a settlement of around $85,000 from Redwood City in October in order to agree to move, as the Palo Alto Daily Post reported. Others were paid as much as $190,000 in other settlements.
Redwood City also paid out over $1.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by a group of anonymous homeowners who had sued over the illegal use of state lands.
