This House Showcases the Segregation and Splendor of Sausalito
Decades of suppression comes with incredible views and at a discount!
A recent study from Berkeley's Haas Institute found Marin is historically and even today one of the most exclusionary communities in the Bay Area-slash-all of California.
What makes Marin unique is it isn't the Qanon-spewing, Blue Lives Matter flag-flying, MAGA hat-wearing real racist wellness moms of Redondo/Hermosa/Manhattan Beach or the constantly oppressing $5k sneaker-wearing super Evangelical pastors of the Central Valley. As stereotypical as those archetypes are, they're real, and they're uncloseted with their views.
Marin County's diversity problem is slightly different. It's spawned from NIMBY-fueled segregation that goes back generations and today features pockets of marginalized populations that have missed out on the continued accumulation of wealth from the white population next door.
When I was an editor at the Pt. Reyes Light, which covered coastal Marin County—a community formed around a handful of rancher gentry class and hippie artisans; think, your farmers' market stretched over a few dozen miles of coastline—one of the big causes was protesting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A bunch of local women got naked in a field and spelled out with their bodies words like "No War," "Peace," and "Bush Sucks." It was a shame-defying show of rebellion, and it garnered national headlines.
But beneath all that, there was something else: there were no women from marginalized groups in these shoots—no mothers of soldiers about to be deployed in the picture.
Yet they were also some of the founders or supporters of the Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT), a public-private lands easement partnership that helped curb development in the name of open space, preservation, and tax breaks.
Self-dealing in the name of good causes isn’t a part of the culture there, it is the culture. Marin County has mastered the trick of being both on the right side of history and getting a healthy dose of positive attention backed with self-preservation or at least plain old white patriarchal preservation of the status quo for the effort.
When it comes to perpetuation of outright racism on top of all this (the two are inter-connected but some places do it better than others), the interior coastline—namely Sausalito—is the epicenter. The town has over the last half-century been ground zero for handwringing measures from white folks in charge that both continue to keep the community isolated and small and at the same time create protection for its residents as they continue to oppress and segregate.
Sausalito Segregation Dates Back Decades
During World War II, Sausalito's waterfront was a job hub for black Americans. More than 2,200 black workers, mostly transplants from the South, migrated to the area during the war and built more than 90 cargo ships in a half-decade.
Though blacks and whites worked side by side, the black population was banned from owning or renting property. Instead, a housing development was spun up in nearby Marin City (now right across the 101 freeway) in an unincorporated area.
Today Marin City remains not only the poorest enclave—with a household median income less than half of the rest of the county—in Marin, but its demographics are so skewed from the rest of the county (40% Black, 13% Latino and 7% other minority groups, and about 40% white. Neighbor, Sausalito, by comparison, is just over one-percent black)—that it's hard to find a domestic comparison. Indeed, Marin City/Sausalito resembles a mini-Johannesburg.
But New Development Will…Make Up for All That(?)
Enter Marinship. Sausalito's 225-acre waterfront district is a developer's wet dream. For years some residents have tried to push out the old houseboats and lean-tos that define the waterfront. Yet, the area remains a working harbor where boats are dragged in, and out of the bay, bilge pump sounds echo up the hillside, and outboard mortars grumble to wake in the morning as a sort of town alarm.
Instead of small-plates restaurants, craft breweries, and more spa and wine tasting and clothing boutiques for men and women of a certain age popping up, harbor workers, artists, and transient (white) populations live among the gently bobbing rows of slow decay.
But last summer, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, Sausalito was debating a future Marinship in the context of, you guessed it, racial justice.
The City Council, by a 4-1 vote, decided to erase language that barred land-based housing there, which would ostensibly open up the area for waterfront affordable housing development and the ability to move in the Marin City-based descendants of those World War II dockworkers back to the land that they could never occupy.
Great, except for one thing: Sausalito's City Council is all white, and the gesture toward making Marinship affordable seemed performative at best.
"We cannot hope to increase diversity in Sausalito if you don't increase the diversity of available housing for a multitude of income levels," then-Vice Mayor Ray Withy said. And then-Mayor Susan Cleveland-Knowles added a heavy dose of the obvious, "We are an overwhelmingly white community," noting adding affordable housing "is the only way we can increase diversity in our town."
Of course, this gets the NIMBY's all fired up. Sausalito resident Bob Silvestri called the plan "a predictable, banal, soulless celebration of consumerism, bereft of character or sense of place."
In this case, everyone's a little bit right but for the wrong reasons.
Affordable housing DOES open up the opportunity for a community to become more diverse, but to what end? In this case, building some shitty condos on the waterfront does nothing to erase three generations of wealth and gains the black community would have made had they been allowed to own or rent in Sausalito in the 1940s.
Doing the rough math, had black families been allowed to stay and buy real estate, it would be Sausalito, not Marin City, that would be 40-50 percent black, and those families would at the very least be millionaires on paper many times over based only on the land grandpa bought for nine thousand dollars working the shipyards.
Reparations in buying up individual homes and selling them to black families at early-40s prices would be a start.
And while residents like Silvestri don't want any development (because development, in the end, brings more traffic, more crime, more interlopers to THEIR city), regardless of the cause or profit motive behind it, he too has a point. Because misplacing the current residents of Marinship is only doing the EXACT SAME THING to a group of people who won't be able to come close to replicating that lifestyle, not only in Sausalito or Marin County—but anywhere else in California. And for what? The potential of a couple new tasting rooms, a ultra-luxe Heath Ceramics showroom, and an underground parking garage that floods three times a decade?
Suppression’s Influence on Pop Culture
There are a pair of notable cultural touchstones that have come out of California's segregated banana belt. One is Otis Redding's "(Sittin' On) the Dock of the Bay.” In August 1967, Redding wrote the song while staying on a houseboat at Waldo Point in Sausalito. He was doing a couple of Fillmore SF shows after his legendary Monterey Pop performance and jotted down the song on some napkins and hotel paper about the boats (and workers) coming in and out of the area. I can't project where the lyrics came from, some songs are divine, but there does seem to be an undercurrent there—Redding's understanding that he can't change the culture, a lonely man, the only black man of his time allowed to recuperate, relax, and remain on that pier.
Tupac Shakur spent his high school years living with his mother Afeni Shakur Davis, a political activist and former member of the Black Panther party, in the Marin City projects. The former editor of the party's newsletter, the Panther Post, struggled with drug addiction in the eighties and relocated from Baltimore to Marin County to get clean. Tupac attended Tamalpais high school, which is a singular example of integration in Marin County.
The progeny of an activist, Tupac came up alongside sons and daughters of actors, bankers, artists, and writers. He continued studying and performing theater there, a skill he'd picked up as a freshman at Baltimore's arts high school. But by January 1991, under the stage name 2Pac, the writer/actor/poet had relocated to Oakland and his first guest vocal was featured on Digital Underground's single “Same Song” from the Chevy Chase on a bad coke bender flop “Nothing But Trouble."
49 Glen Dr. Sausalito, CA 94965
And now, to add on another layer of privilege-dusted guilt, I'm shilling for Sausalito. But let's be clear on one thing: I’m here because the town's aging white power veneer is now coming at a discount.
Because while other parts of the Bay Area have morphed into what they were designed to be: garbage exurban tract nightmares—we're talking freeways, strip malls, car exhaust, and so much traffic (even in COVID), suicidal ideation comes standard—Sausalito remains San Francisco's quirky tree house or backyard artist's studio, tucked away in the forest, overlooking the prettiest skyline in America, pretty much congestion- and traffic-free.
So let's get into the good. As mentioned, it's so fucking close to San Francisco; people can and do swim there all the time.
There's a literal fork in the road as one approaches the Wye as you're heading south toward the Golden Gate Bridge, and its literal locals take a right (Caledonia) tourists to the left (Bridgeway.)
It's on Caledonia that you'll still find the best sushi in the world, good pick-up hoop under the lights at Robin Sweeny Park across the way from Smitty's Neighborhood Bar, a salty little locals' trap where transients meet up with houseboat dwellers, meet up with aging artists and writers, who are still tucked up in the foothills above.
Yes, as one gets closer to the Bridgeway waterfront commercial district (the opposite end of town from Marinship), the place morphs. Sausalito is suddenly overflowing with the requisite amount of taffy pullers, bronze statue and oil painting studios, T-shirt hawkers, and racist boutiques—enough to almost muddle the natural seascape unbroken but for the packs of middle-aged Marin dads in their spandex pedaling along like they own the place, because, essentially, they do.
But what remains in the infill of Sausalito is magic. It’s Fred's Place on the corner of Bridgeway and Spring—the best communal dining pigs in a blanket you'll ever have. Alternatively, if you're in the mood for strong coffee and not sharing your Sunday paper, it's the Lighthouse Cafe three blocks down,
For years I frequented the Golden Gate Market for a six-pack of something nice to sip by the water after a run from Fort Baker, across the Golden Gate, down to Crissy Field, and back again. Good ten-plus miles over the greatest expanse over the vast ocean into a city that seems all too welcoming from that vantage point.
My last stint living in Sausalito in the early '00s was a brief one, only eighteen months all-told, but this house was one I ran by regularly. It's still a couple of hundred grand less than the town's median home price of $1.5 million. More than this, it's less expensive than these shitholes in much less accessible, and more sprawly suburban fever dreams in nearby Pleasanton, or Walnut Creek, or Novato.
This home built in the early '50s, has views that justify the asking price, and is appropriately compact and welcoming.
The City is an arm's length away, but the reality is once you're there, you don't leave Sausalito much. Once you're on the dock of the bay, you're in bed early, listening to the waters crash gently against the giant boulders. The sway of the naked masts lull you into comfort. Now, if you could only come by it fairly.