Leave it to a Millennial to hack San Francisco's housing crisis. Last month, Business Insider told the tale of a 23-year-old woman who solved the problem of finding an affordable apartment by finding a sailboat instead.
For $350 a month — plus $9,600 up front for the boat itself — recent Bay Area "newcomer" Sarah Carter sleeps aboard a 136-square foot sailboat moored at an unidentified local marina. The accommodations are spartan, she showers at shared facilities ashore (or at her job at an unidentified "e-commerce" firm, a 45-minute drive away), and her neighbors are "salty" — natch — but after five months of a life aquatic, she'll "break even" on the market rent she'd otherwise be paying, she told BI.
A novel solution, but one that's extremely hard to pursue. Live-aboards are rare in San Francisco, where only one of the city's recreational piers — the private marina at Pier 39 — allows people to live on their boats.
Sleeping at sea is legal elsewhere in the Bay Area, like in Emeryville, Berkeley, and Alameda, but live-aboards can account for no more than 10 percent of any marina's slips under Bay Conservation and Development Commission rules.Carter did not immediately respond to an Instagram message seeking comment, but judging by her Instagram feed, she's tied up somewhere in the East Bay.
Further, in order to host live-aboards, a marina must have bathroom facilities on-shore, as well as a pump-out station to remove sewage. This rules out the Marina District marinas, as well as the boatyard by AT&T Park, although rumors abound of illicit live-aboards avoiding authorities at those docks.
At Pier 39 — where the tenants of 32 lucky boats have been sleeping and showering to the sounds of sea lions for decades — demand has become so high that there's a three-to-five year waitlist for a slip to open up, Harbormaster Sheila Chandor told SF Weekly. "We get 20 calls a day from people looking to live aboard," she says, noting that turnover is random but can take years.
Predictably, people trying to illegally live aboard their boats has also increased. "People are getting more desperate," says Chandor, who notes that the price of being caught is steep: exile from the marina and removal from the waitlist.
Limited supply and strict environmental protection rules mean that, despite Salesforce's recent use of a cruise ship as a floating hotel to get around excessive room prices for its Dreamforce conference, nobody has proposed houseboats as a pat solution for the Bay Area's housing problem. Yet.
That's probably a good thing, as living on the sea — even in the bay —is not for everyone.
"It's like camping," Chandor says. "What I say to people who apply here is, 'You're not here to be living in a house that happens to be floating. You are making a lifestyle choice by living on your boat.'"
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