INTERVIEW: Joe Kloc
Lost at Sea:
Poverty and Paradise Collide
at the Edge of America
Joe Kloc
Dey Street Books
An interview with Nick O’Brien
Any Bay Area resident has long been accustomed to living amid staggering levels of homelessness. Destitution is wallpaper in the City by the Bay, one of the great tragedies, and failures, of the region. Those who live there long enough come to know not just homelessness itself, but also the often oppressive ways in which the system responds to it: encampment clearings, anti-loitering ordinances – even well-intentioned responses like shelter construction are often misguided or blocked by NIMBYs in town halls or at the ballot box.
In recent years, as our national housing crisis has spiraled out of control, it has become harder to see the acuteness of homelessness as unique to the Bay Area or California. Sometimes it feels like every major city has a Tenderloin now. And so, while Lost at Sea (HarperCollins, 2025), the new book from Joe Kloc, is a California story, it is also an American story.
The book covers a span of nearly a decade in which Kloc visited and reported on the anchor-outs, an unhoused community living on abandoned boats in Richardson Bay off Sausalito, and their struggle against a city that wanted them gone. During that time, the anchor-outs thrive, struggle, build community, face eviction, and eventually disperse. They dream and hatch ambitious projects. They devote incredible ingenuity, ambition, and faith in service of asserting their right to live on their own terms. They suffer agonizing loss and injustice. Some of them die. A few make it through the storm and manage to flourish on the other side.
Kloc, who often spent nights with the anchor-outs on their boats and tent encampments as he pieced together their story, captures it all in an account that paints an intimate picture of a beleaguered community, connecting their plight to a thorough exploration of Bay Area history incorporating the Gold Rush, the 1906 earthquake, the Summer of Love, and more. Kloc is a journalist, an editor at Harper’s Magazine, and perhaps the only person I know who is simultaneously a romantic and a realist – both of which shine through in the pages of Lost at Sea. He’s also a personal friend, and has been since we met in college 20 years ago. So it was a pleasure to visit him at his home in Jersey City, NJ, to catch up over a couple non-alcoholic Heinekens and talk to him about this remarkable book.
Nick O’Brien: You got to know the anchor-outs for many years over the course of writing this book. How did this story, and your interest in this community, come about?
Joe Kloc: I actually first became aware of the anchor-outs several years before my reporting started. In 2010, when I was living in San Francisco, I heard about them from a friend, who suggested it as an interesting story, but in narrow terms: a unique off-the-grid community clashing with the city of Sausalito.
I didn’t end up acting on that tip at the time, but as I read more on homelessness, and talked to more unhoused people, I found my own views on the subject were changing and becoming more complicated. We often think of homelessness as being driven by poverty, or addiction, or mental illness, but it was becoming clear to me that it’s often not nearly as simple as that. I started to see the anchor-outs as potentially a great way to explore that complexity. So in 2015, I made my first visit. The project originally culminated in a Harper’s article that came out in 2019, but the anchor-outs’ lives were so profoundly affected by subsequent events, like the pandemic and the government’s ramped-up efforts to evict them, that I realized the work wasn’t finished, and so that’s how I ended up expanding the story into a book.
NO: The book has a really intimate feel, but it’s also infused with forays into broader California history dating back more than a century. In what ways is the anchor-outs’ story connected to the story of California?
JK: The culture of the anchorage, and Sausalito for that matter, are over a century old. They’ve been shaped not only by the days of the gold and silver rush of old San Francisco, but also by the second World War, the Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury scene, the Christian Hippie movement, the Dot Com boom and bust, and the contemporary homelessness crisis. California, more than most of America, has always existed in the popular imagination as a destination. Both the anchor-outs and the wealthy community that surrounds them are products of the same phenomenon of an extraordinary infusion of wealth and opportunity occurring in a tiny area, and people flocking to try to take advantage of that opportunity – a process that produces stark divides between winners and losers, haves and have-nots. That, in many ways, is the story of California.
NO: I also see parallels between this story and the high-profile tent cities we’ve seen proliferating across America in recent years, especially when the anchor-outs literally end up in a tent city near the end of the book. That proliferation has drawn so much scorn both from media and from the public. And it brings to mind this question of how much of that is paternalistic and how much of it is about tent cities being an affront to people’s collective sensibility of what society should look like. Where do you come down on this?
JK: Honestly, I feel pretty cynical. It was less “Oh, we have to get these people to a safe location,” and more “I didn’t move [to Sausalito] to see this.” There’s a part in the book where someone at a Town Hall meeting says something to the effect of “I have nothing but sympathy for these people, but they made the caviar store go away.” The fact that, for many people, it doesn’t feel wrong to say that, really shows this shortage of empathy. Most people didn’t want anything bad to happen to the anchor-outs, but that’s outweighed by their desire for their life and their town to be and look a certain way.
I should say that there were, in fact, real impacts on Sausalito that this community brought. The anchor-out community more than doubled after the Great Recession, and that growth did include people who were not skilled in boating, who came because it offered them a sense of anonymity, who were desperate, and it’s not crazy to say that that probably contributed to a rise in crime and disruption. When you have somebody who's gone through these very difficult experiences, which can begin with something like a divorce or a lost job, it can spiral out of control, and they can make choices they're not always proud of. And they have to live with the burden of the choices they make in hardship.
The issue is that other people don’t want to live with that burden. You have people who say “If I saw someone in need, I would help them,” but when faced with the reality of what desperation truly looks like, they say, “Well, why do these people have to be here? Why can’t they go somewhere else?” And when town after town voices those complaints, that’s how you end up with people being driven into these areas of highly concentrated poverty like Skid Row or the Tenderloin.
NO: When you incorporate the city’s perspective on the anchor-outs, it’s mostly through their contributions to Town Hall meetings, like you just mentioned, or through the actions of the government. The townspeople speak more as a municipality than as a collection of named, specific people. Was that intentional?
JK: When I say that people don’t want bad things to happen to the anchor-outs, but also don’t like having the anchor-outs around, both of those things are true. Individuals really do wish that everyone could be happy. They have really diverse opinions on this stuff. The treatment of the anchor-outs came from the city and the system as a whole, and while city governments are elected by individuals, it felt unfair to make any individual into the face of what happened to the anchor-outs.
NO: This all brings to mind a kind of chicken-or-egg scenario I often wonder about when I think about homelessness: Are people unhoused because they’ve had some kind of breakdown, or did they have a breakdown because of the relentless stress, deprivation, and abuse that must characterize the homeless experience for so many? In the book, you write: “Most of those living in the Marinship encampment were not unhoused because of some mental illness. Now, however, some were losing themselves.” Over the years you knew these people, did you observe apparent changes in their mental state, or at least their disposition, as time went on and things kept getting harder?
JK: Definitely. There was one guy who, when I met him, presented as a proper sailor, a man of the sea who loved the lifestyle. By the end, he was really broken down, avoiding eye contact, just not the same person in a lot of ways. The lifestyle is undeniably taxing. When you sleep on these boats, it's extremely cold; no amount of blankets change that. In the middle of the night, you hear people rowing by you, and you have no way of knowing their intentions; sometimes incidents of theft or assault do occur out there. Most of all, the abuse from the town – evicting them, crushing their boats – really did take a toll on these people.
NO: Early in the book, you describe some of the anchor-outs “complaining of all the ways in which local columnists failed to get their story right.” Did you feel pressure covering a story that has so much history? Did the anchor-outs regard you with any skepticism? And now that the book is out, do they have any hopes or expectations tied up in it?
JK: It was a mixed bag. One anchor-out named Innate, who figures heavily in the book, was very much on my side. But some were definitely skeptical and remained so for years. It’s not that all the local journalism had been wrong, per se, but rather that some of the columnists – and, more to the point, op-ed writers – covering the anchor-outs lived in the area and had their views shaped by the side of the line they were on personally.
When anchor-outs were frustrated with me, it was largely in the aftermath of the Harper’s article. Some of them had really specific ideas about which specific aspects of the story were the most important to tell and were most illustrative of the hypocrisy of the city and the injustice being perpetrated against them, and some of those aspects didn’t make it into the article, which grated on those folks. I had to remind them, “Hey, I’m working on a book to follow up on the article, so a lot more of the story will be told.” Sadly, most of these people have lost their boats and are scattered – I don’t know where they are now or what their situation is, but I hope they get the chance to read it.
In terms of their expectations, I don’t think any of them think that it will change their fate, especially since at this point their fate has already been decided. But they had this sense that if people really understood what was going on, they’d be outraged on their behalf, so maybe the book gives them hope in that sense. It’s a stranger question than one might think, because again, different people had different interpretations of the injustice being perpetrated against them. For some it was, “This is a federal anchorage, so local municipalities don’t have any jurisdiction to regulate it.” Others pointed to a Supreme Court case all the way in Florida that they thought proved the city’s actions unconstitutional. So I think some people hope that their particular perspective will shine through.
NO: Much of what the anchor-outs tell you feels folkloric or almost mythical. There’s an anecdote about someone moving to the anchorage during the Summer of Love with Shel Silverstein, who built a cabin on top of one of the boats. Sometimes you question the veracity of what they say in these moments, and sometimes you don’t. What was the thinking there?
JK: Part of it was that a lot of what they were saying did, in fact, turn out to be true, even if it seemed suspicious at the time. They might have said something about what the city was trying to do to them that initially came off as paranoid, and I would doubt it, only to have the city later do that exact thing. But more than that, the anchor-outs speak in a way that often makes sense only to them, or only after you spend a lot of time with them. Every seemingly non-sequitur Bible verse or tall tale had a reason and a meaning, even if it wasn’t apparent at the time. The anchor-outs speak a language that I don’t, so rather than try to decode it, I wanted to present it to readers so that they could puzzle over it if they want.
