Click here to return to our Houseboats Menu
Click here to see our Sausalito Houseboats for Sale listings
Sausalito Houseboats
Anyone can do a walking tour of the Sausalito houseboats community. You’ll see everything from architectural gems to beautifully repurposed old working boats. And if you expand your walk beyond the well known areas you’ll encounter, well, a few maintenance-challenged gangways, piers and vessels.
Insider Tips: When you visit the docks, it’s the same as when someone approaches the front porch of your home or strolls beneath the windows of your apartment. You’re really close to residents’ living space.
-
Residents prefer that you admire the boats from shore to reduce noise and avoid crowding on the narrow docks. I took the photo above from an easy to access spot within the area covered by the map below, and some of the best views of the floating homes come from shore.
-
Please keep voices and noise levels low. A nurse, chef, paramedic or firefighter who works a swing or graveyard shift may be sleeping nearby. If you have young kids in the family — as we do — walking the docks is not a good idea for both safety and noise level reasons.
-
Please do not smoke on or near the houseboat piers. The walkways are made of wood, and the top planks are dried by years of the hot summer sun. Cigarette butts that enter bay waters are toxic to marine life.
-
Please don’t ride bikes on the docks. The pathways are narrow and there are many blind intersections with the gangways that lead to each home. (For residents this is a “Don’t be a jerk” issue.)
-
Visitor dogs are prohibited from the docks due to visitors not having cleaned up after them. This area is the “front yard” for each home so this is an important rule.
(Scroll down for our favorite video about the floating homes community)
This vibrant community of floating homes recently turned 65 years old, but it remains as rebellious and vibrant as ever. You can read about the two most famous “golden era” Sausalito houseboats on the Taj Mahal page and on our Forbes Island page.
Insiders Tip: If you’re hungry when you arrive in the floating homes neighborhood, you have three local favorites to choose from that have been listed multiple times in the Top 10 of our Best Cafes, Deli’s and Diners list:
- Davy Jones Deli inside the “Bait Shop Market” has excellent sandwiches
- Bayside Cafe offers tasty sit-down meals, next to Davy Jones at the Harbor Center on Gate 6 Road
- On Gate 5 Road just south of the floating homes area Anchorage 5 serves great American and Mexican breakfast and lunch items.
Insiders Tip: One bike tour operator endangers both his clients and local residents by encouraging visitors to ride their bikes on the docks, which the Floating Homes owners have asked people not to do. Steer clear of renting bikes from anyone who says this is OK.
Where to See the Sausalito Houseboats
The easiest places to do a walking tour of a wide variety of houseboats are:
- Around the northern Gate 5 Road area (Liberty Dock, Issaquah Dock, South 40 Dock and Main Dock)
- At the Gate 6 Road Waldo Point Harbor area (Kappa’s Marina, Gate 6 1/2 Road behind the seaplane and heliport area)
In the map below I highlighted Liberty Dock and Issaquah Dock to get you started, which are towards the northern side of the Gate Five Road houseboats area. You can park in the Waldo Point Harbor lot for a shorter visit, or park on surface streets for a longer walk.
Marin Transit has Bus Stops on Bridgeway at Gate Five Road.
Insiders Tip: Many members of the local community strongly prefer the term “Sausalito Floating Homes” to “Sausalito Houseboats.” Refer to them this way and you’re more likely to make friends with folks.
You’ll also see a few of the battered survivors from the old era of improvised houseboats of decades past. Some docks are lined by beautiful flowers in containers that are tended by the owners as their “front yards”, and many of the homes have names and unique decorations.
Some of these homes were once boats of different kinds, and the architectural visions that translated them into floating houses can be fascinating. As has been the tradition, many of the houseboat community members are professional artists.
Stick to the well-maintained areas on your walking tour. There are some improvised walkways and planking near the shore in a few places but you don’t need to traverse any of these areas to admire the best architecture and it’s safer (and more respectful of residents’ privacy) to avoid them.
A paid walking tour of the houseboats, Liberty Ship shipyards area and the yacht harbors of Sausalito is offered on Saturdays and Sundays by a local guide.
Note: The space numbers on the docks on the map below were chosen randomly to get Google Maps to highlight each dock. There is no significance to the numbers chosen, and the houseboats moored there may be of little interest compared to others nearby.
.
The walking route between the Bay Model and the main Sausalito Houseboats area is shown in this map:
Sausalito’s Floating Homes Community: Still Rebellious at 65
The famous Sausalito houseboat community chronicled in the late Phil Frank’s fascinating book of historical photos has a history that stretches back well over a century.
The modern community was born in 1945, when the hastily-built Marinship Shipyards were just as hastily shut down at the end of World War II. Returning veterans, artists, maritime workers, musicians and others appropriated the many abandoned vessels, small and large, as living spaces, and for over 25 years the community evolved and grew.
In its most famous era, from the 1950’s through the 1970’s, the area became a checkerboard of improvised floating homes that ranged from the elegant to the innovative-and-creative to the downright dangerous. The population living there likewise became, well… the people ranged from the elegant to the innovative-and-creative to the downright dangerous.
After a series of incidents including a murder, local officials fought a long series of battles with various groups, and eventually struck a compromise where the remaining boats came into harbors, received much-needed sewer hookups and were formally approved as homes.
For some of the residents of the freewheeling boat community a wonderful way of life was lost because of the actions of a relative few.
On the other side of the equation, most of the old houseboats were not connected to sewer lines, which almost everyone agreed had become necessary as the population grew. Walking around the area at low tide in the 1960’s and 1970’s often meant encountering a wall of nasty odors that would repel all but the most hardy travelers. It got so bad that when the wind blew in from across the Bay at low tide you’d wince inside your car driving by northern Sausalito on Highway 101, and accelerate to get out of the bad smell faster!
Fortunately some of the most impassioned and creative members of the original community remain active in Sausalito today, and have worked to preserve the remaining artifacts of our maritime history. In September of 2013 they successfully saved the paddlewheel and smokestack of the Ferry Charles Van Damme from destruction, and they’re working to restore and display them, motivated by the boat’s 100th anniversary in 2016.
Check out our page on The Sausalito Historical Society for more links on Sausalito history.
The Annual Sausalito Floating Homes Tour
We have now given the Tour its own page, which you can see by clicking here.
See the video below for an example of what you’ll see on the tour.
Video Tour of Sausalito Houseboats
Here’s our favorite video about the floating homes community in Sausalito, with a great summary of the history of the houseboats.
