Reporting on People Living Rent-Free Next to Millionaires | Field Notes

[Music] reporters for vice news travel the world putting a human face to the world's most important stories there's a solid wall of ryan police officers but now we introduce you to them they're doing cpr on one of the casualties here we don't know if he's going to make it this is field notes a show that sits down with our reporters to find out the stories behind their stories and how they got so close to the action feeling pretty good about that in this episode we meet the team who climbed aboard the rickety boats of the bay area's anchor outs a community that's fighting to make sure they don't get wiped off the map [Music] so this is your boat this is my boat the kindred spirits i grew up on the water what do you love about it i want freedom you know no neighbors i can be loud and it's cheap cheaper than living on land howdy hi there so i came here at the beginning of the 21st century and it's a way to get away from the pressures of onshore life why don't you want to live on shore well paying the rent to the landlord is is not my bag at the moment i mean the average rent here i couldn't dan mustafa thanks for joining me today we just heard from a bunch of anchor outs about what their community means to them um talk to me about what they represent like on a broader picture so the ankero community is a collection of a few dozen people who live on boats in richardson bay which is in marin county just north of san francisco and it's kind of this last group of a dying counterculture in the bay area people who see a way to live without paying any rent without paying a mortgage in one of the most probably the most beautiful one of the most expensive places to live in america right so they're kind of like they've found a workaround to the obvious and well-covered crisis of housing and in like inequality in california in the bay area and most of the like it is really beautiful i've spent a little bit of time on the sausalito like harbor and it's like gorgeous and you're surrounded by millionaires and these are people who are very much counter-cultural so like what was it like finding this story seeing the microcosm here and then having people talk to you the the minute you step foot in richardson bay you can tell that it's a place where you have the famous and the rich living there in their waterfront houses and in the middle of the bay you have all these kind of sailboats lined up really just kind of not moving they're anchored out over there they have these gorgeous views and when you start meeting everyone you kind of realize that hey actually this has been going on for a very long time because those houses those boats are stacked you have one we we met some people who had been living there for 20 30 years wow um so yeah it's the the kind of when you kind of think about deep inequality in america it's it's like the most visual metaphor when you go there because it's see these boats they're stacked they're semi-derelict and then across you have beautiful mansions and then in the marina you have these yachts over there right um and they've managed to be you know they've managed to stay there for decades now except now you know authorities are clamping down well so let's talk about those authorities clamping down because in a way if you think about the anchor outs as like a time capsule to a different era of what the san francisco bay area looked like they maybe didn't change all that much maybe they did we can talk about that but certainly the owners of the land around it around the bay what was it like for you to be out there because i mean i've seen you cover things on the water before specifically and i got you know uh but what was it like to kind of feel that cultural difference and be able to see it i mean going around we had a local guide basically show us around a member of the community i could see the romantic notion of living on the water you know you look out and you can see all of san francisco you can see the whole skyline and it's beautiful it's also a really hard way to live when storms come around people really have to lock down their boats some people don't know how to handle storms too so their boats become unmoored from their anchors and crash into the docks as we see so it's both a very beautiful and romantic way to live but it has a lot of challenges and those challenges are weather but they're also like what's happening in these people's lives as well we can romanticize the concept of living on a boat but some of the lives of the people you're talking about are pretty rough yeah i mean in addition to the enforcement which we'll talk about a lot of these people do work they work full-time jobs we talk to somebody who's an uber driver our main character alex is a fisherman so it's not like they're doing this because they don't want to work to earn a living is that the living that they're earning couldn't allow them to actually rent a place in this area right so they in order to be an uber driver in the bay area on that income they'd have to live hours outside of the bay area itself yeah marin county the area where we filmed famously has a lack of affordable housing and has opposed denser developments a lot of residents have opposed more density and more affordable housing for decades now right and so this is sort of a manifestation of that is there anything in particular mustafa that you found there because like yes this is a nationwide story about housing inequality about the price of housing going up about people's working jobs not necessarily paying a living wage such they can live where they want to um what were some of the unique aspects that you found because it is such a unique place i think the first thing that you that is kind of in your face when you get there is that actually it's not so much about this counterculture it's not so much about the kind of romantic living and and this kind of you know idea that people have that would be so great to live on a boat you go there and it's like okay you can tell that this has now become a big issue around class divisions um and the the deep kind of inequality around that so i think that in itself because you you get you get on the skiff from the public dock which is kind of lined with these yachts that are you know the fanciest yachts you'll ever see and then you kind of make your way through them and you're like oh this is such a beautiful day where you know it's it's i kind of envy people who live on boats and then you get to the boats and you're like well one second what's going on over here i think people who struggle who can't make rent who have opted to live alternatively for them the good days are the best days because you have the sun out you have great views around a lot of the stuff that we heard was you can be as loud as you want to okay right like we don't have any neighbors bothering us um so you have those elements but then you see the conditions of these boats and the way that they're living and actually how difficult it is and i want to talk about the opposition like those people who are landowners who who believe this is a nuisance of some sort or illegal but within the anchor out community is we'll get to that but within the anchor out community itself is there like broad consensus on like what to do so part of the problem now is that it became almost a too too popular of a way to live and a lot of people in the last decade have have sort of joined the community you know back in the 80s and 90s there were far fewer boats and they were always kind of in violation of this law that says you can only anchor for 72 hours but then more and more people started joining and more and more less experienced people started joining too and you know people who don't necessarily know what to do with their boats in a storm or don't have the proper you know sewage disposal so there are some in the community who feel both angry at the newcomers and feel like they're ruining it for everyone and then others like alex who's our main character really feels a responsibility to make sure that those people don't mess up and cause problems for everyone else and don't cause a further crackdown but it's almost too late already as we're seeing like the crackdown is happening the enforcement is happening and people's votes are being removed and people don't necessarily have any legal protections if they are anchor outs if they have been anchored out for longer than 72 hours is that right yeah they don't have any legal protections in the way that you would have if you had a house on land however if a vessel has people who are living on them weird maritime laws come into effect that you can't actually board the vessel if it's if the if the owners are on on board unless you have an order from a judge so for instance the harbor master in our story um he actually doesn't have the authority to physically kick people out but he has the authority to put an eviction notice or what would be an eviction notice in marriage in the maritime world that you have x amount of days and you know what you have violated and when by when you need to be getting out but a lot of the anchor outs they've had these notices put on their votes for years and and they're still living there because they don't have another option well that's kind of what i was saying about like it's the confrontation of maritime laws or the law of the ocean or like what's tolerated out in a wild less than like you know linear world versus people who've really done very well in the linear world itself and are now like whoa i don't know if we can tolerate this anymore like that that's the culture clash that is so apparent and so intriguing because it's it's deep it cuts to like a deep part of like uh you know the spirit of like american culture in many ways and also like what it means to survive like these are people who in many ways have found a way to survive some of them have some personal issues that are pretty difficult to deal with certainly there aren't mental health facilities like uh that are particularly open to a lot of people so like i guess that's what i liked about about the story so much it made me ask so many questions about like wait what should be tolerated what should happen when someone maybe breaks the law as it's written how do communities respond when they're put under pressure and what's the role of being you know someone who made it i think what's interesting is that a lot of these people even though some of them have jobs are just like one step away from homelessness i got hot water here i got a shower yeah there's a stilt top right here you know if you're not dressing the polo shirt around here and khakis you don't fit in do you feel judged by the people in this area a lot yeah they just look at us discussed i'm a working man dude i work on everything motors cars trucks my boat you get dirty you know i've had people come up to me at 7 11 and hand me money and i'm like you know i mean like like i don't thank you but i don't i don't need the money you know i work i got a job you know i take care of myself it's like if they weren't on these boats they'd be homeless in the community and it's a question of which you know which would the community prefer if there isn't affordable housing or transitional housing for these people would they rather they be homeless and we see in the piece the consequences of pushing people out there's a homeless encampment in sausalito right by the shipyard where they crush the boats and those are people who have been pushed out of the anchor out community and you say push they're not allowed to be evicted necessarily by force so how is it that they get pushed so the harbor master goes around and labels boats as marine debris and says they're not seaworthy um and he has a whole criteria for that he's he's a you know experienced mariner so he he has maybe stricter criteria than people in the community would have for what is the seaworthy boat so he can declare this boat is nazi worthy and it's actually debris and it's clogging up the bay and puts that notice on and if people don't respond to it within a certain amount of days he will hire a company to tow it in and then if he still doesn't hear from them they'll crush the vote and that was like something i thought really extraordinary about the piece and about that the facts on the ground which is as you said they're housing temporarily some of these people who are anchor outs right next to where they're crushing those boats like the visual metaphor there is just like shocking honestly and heartbreaking a little bit because you see how much these boats mean to these people it's their houses it's their way of life uh it's both metaphorical but also very concrete and real um what was it like how did you learn that that was the case and when you did it how did it strike you yeah um i think the first day before we even filmed um i went and scouted that entire area and it was just so shocking to see that the shipyard was actually only you know like right in front of the camp um i think coming to a certain point of like just talking a little bit about like why we got to film in the shipyard i think it goes to show that this story is so tense and so with such and and kind of brings out so much in everybody that everybody actually wanted to talk to us about it and i think that's why we had such access in the shipyard and with the harbor master himself [Music] you look at that boat right there you can see the underbelly of the boat and the mast is tilted to one side that boat's sitting in the mud so it's not floating it's not floating you know you take a look at every single piece of debris that's on that deck could go right in the water gas cans full of gasoline oil and other petroleum residues off of his engine you know people have died out here you know it's for the combination of both public safety and protection of the environment do you ever feel conflicted with your role in piece by piece sort of taking apart this community i wouldn't say conflicted probably a better word is empathetic uh i recognize that for many of these people those boats out there are all they have that is every single worldly possession that they have is out there on the water and so in that sense yes i feel conflicted but the bottom line is you're breaking the law i think the harbor masters job on one hand is enforcing the law but also you know he himself told us like actually i can't even afford to live over here and i think that's really emblematic of like what's going on in america right now with deep inequality like this is the purest example of what class division is we know there's rich people and poor people but this is what that looks like which is to say the people who have the privilege in this situation are looking out for their own interests while putting the people who don't have the privilege to look out for their their own interests but they have nothing to fall back on no recourse to it rather than saying hey we're kind of in this together because i live here and you live there how can we find a way forward i think that's the question that the piece kind of asks is like how do we what's the way forward here is it just we is it just that every harbor gets cleaned up like it's only rich people get to live by the water like you know these are tough questions and i think that's what i ultimately like really respect about the way you guys covered this is that and why i imagine so many people would would want to talk to you is because there aren't any easy answers there isn't like a a clean cut like oh this person's right this person's wrong um it off it falls in the gray uh and it just provokes so many questions about like how do you how does a community respond to something that everyone kind of knows like this isn't ideal right we can tolerate it so long as it there isn't big problems that end up happening but what you caught and what you saw was the action the process of it being dealt with in a way that maybe was cruel to the most vulnerable people you know in the equation and when the solutions that the town or the local agencies come up with creates another problem entirely which is the homeless camp tell me about that yeah it's a lot of people in limbo i mean some people have talked about getting another boat and just going back out again but it's it's created a big problem for the city when we were there there were issues with contaminated soil because their homeless encampment is in the middle of like these bathrooms that are used for the nearby tennis courts and and the soil had fecal matter in it and people were getting sick all kinds of infections some people went to the hospital from it so kicking the anchor outs off of the bay has created like a whole host of other problems for the town i think another thing to keep in mind with the camp is that you have a lot of former um anchor outs as you saw with tim whose boat gets crushed who now live in the camp i bought my boat for 27 000 10 years ago i wanted to live on the water that was my dream the water life was always kind this is your bed yeah this is my boat i don't even know where to start i mean as you can see my whole life was in here [Music] so what's this this is my uh grandma's photo album that my uncle had that got passed down because he just recently died but then you also have other families um and individuals who've been living in the camp also for some time um who who weren't necessarily living on the water but that is where the that kind of entire community now comes together and they're fighting for housing and they want the resources around them but you know it's just it's not panning out and as alex said you know if he gets kicked off the boat that's where he will end up these are all working-class folks they they they're trying to you know get jobs so that they can at least afford to have sustenance on their daily needs if not shelter and it's kind of all coming together in that camp and yeah it's that is where once all the boats get cleared out in the next three years was it three years 2025 yeah so when all the boats get cleared out by 2025 that's where everybody's going to go and this problem will just keep growing well thank you guys for covering this story it has so much of what's going on in the united states today localized into like microcosm and i learned so much and i think it poses a lot of questions that aren't easily answerable so thanks again thank you thanks you

Channel: VICE News

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Keywords: VICE News, VICE News Tonight, VICE on HBO, news, vice video, VICE on SHOWTIME, vice news 2020

Id: XFVEyIzrreY

Length: 19min 43sec (1183 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 09 2022