On Monday, a two-story house, similar to those usually found in US cities, was towed several kilometers out to sea across San Francisco Bay. The sight of a completely ordinary-looking house in the middle of the water attracted the attention of the inhabitants of the area. Moving a houseboat is not strange in itself, but the distance traveled was considerable: around 50 kilometres, from the south to the north part of the bay.
The house started from the Docktown Marina, in Redwood City, in Silicon Valley, just south of San Francisco, where until recently there was a large community of houseboats. The move is due to a legal dispute: a local lawyer had in fact sued the city, claiming that the group of houseboats violated the law because it blocked passage on a state navigable canal. The city agreed to move the homes, paying the owners a fee for the relocation. The U.S. Coast Guard escorted the house en route.
In San Francisco, a city famous among other things for the very high prices of its homes, it also happens that houses on the land are moved: it happened relatively frequently in the 1960s and 1970s, and it also happened once in 2021.
– Read also: In San Francisco a house was moved almost a kilometre
