‘A cataclysmic mess’: Is anyone to blame for the state of the San Leandro marina?
While 8 a.m. on a weekday might entail groggy commutes for many San Leandro residents, Eric Shields and Jennifer Crowell recently spent a frenzied morning scrambling to store their personal belongings somewhere safe amid rumors of looming evictions and arrests near Marina Park.
The couple have lived for months aboard a boat docked at the Wes McClure Boat Launch near the once-vibrant marina.
Now they and other “anchor-outs” may be forced to leave as San Leandro grapples with how to manage its shoreline amid stalled development plans and complaints from residents that the waterfront has devolved into a debris-filled, chaotic mess. Compounding the challenge is the fact that housing costs in the once-affordable East Bay city, as in the rest of the Bay Area, have ballooned in recent years.
In mid-August, the city’s public works department posted notices at the boat launch saying officials would soon remove bicycles, propane tanks and other debris that was blocking the public right of way. A public outcry specifically targeted boat dwellers living in the area, in violation of city policy, and the way their belongings spilled onto local paths and docks.
“We knew this day was going to come,” Shields said.
For longtime San Leandro resident Erica Moore, enforcement of municipal codes in the area is a step in the right direction — even if she has concerns about the city’s management of the marina area.
While she sympathizes with boat residents like Shields and Crowell, Moore thinks the San Leandro shoreline has changed from a “beautiful area of the city” into “a place that makes me sad and frustrated every time I visit,” she wrote in an Aug. 7 letter to city officials.
Moore, who frequents the area with her dogs, said she has felt increasingly unsafe and frustrated with the city’s lack of upkeep at the waterfront. With its green spaces, walking paths, golf courses and safe waters, San Leandro’s unique shoreline could be an amazing asset to the city, Moore said. But since January, when the city shuttered the marina, Moore has noticed growing piles of trash, aggressive pets and an increase in homeless residents — including on the water, in roughly half a dozen seemingly unseaworthy boats.
Over the past year, she said, a wooden dock near the abandoned Spinnaker’s Yacht Club has accumulated trash bags and miscellaneous items. Near the Marina Park parking lot, a partially capsized boat lays sideways on the rocks with the hull facing the pedestrian path.
“It looks like the city has abandoned the area,” she said. “It looks like they just don’t care.”
San Leandro spokesperson Paul Sanftner wrote in an email to the Bay Area News Group that the boats are docked in violation of city policy and that the city is developing an ordinance to change anchoring in city water “from merely against city policy to against the law.”
The city Police Department does not have a marine unit and a police officer told a reporter that while they do patrol the marina daily, they do not patrol the water.
Moore and other residents say they are frustrated with the city, not boat residents like Shields and Crowell.
“They just have to keep moving and they have nowhere to go,” she said.
The challenges at the marina have been on the city’s radar since 2005 when the city determined dredging the 462-boat marina — a process that ensures safe entrance and exit into the San Francisco Bay — became too costly. In 2008, the city partnered with Gardena-based Cal-Coast Development to plan for massive redevelopment of the San Leandro shoreline area. Initial plans for the Monarch Bay Shoreline Development Project — including restaurants, shops, office space, housing and more — were submitted to the city in 2012, with potential construction start dates projected for 2016, the Bay Area News Group previously reported.
But a lawsuit and pandemic-related delays stalled the project. The city officially closed the marina in 2023 and blocked the entrance earlier this year, but major development, while planned, has yet to begin. Sanftner acknowledged the marina is “in disrepair.”
The city removed remaining boats in late January and early February, displacing some anchor-outs to the nearby Small Boat Lagoon or — in Shields and Crowell’s case — out into the bay.
The city offered cash assistance to help residents repair their boats and leave the area, Sanftner said, and funded temporary motel stays.
“The city’s policy is to treat everyone with respect,” Sanftner said.
Boat residents don’t see it that way, complaining the ousting came during a spate of stormy weather caused by historic atmospheric rivers.
“It was degrading,” Crowell said. “They didn’t care.”
A boat they had been living on sank with many of their belongings, including government documents and keepsakes like Crowell’s son’s baby teeth, aboard, they said.
“It all turned into a cataclysmic mess,” local homeless advocate Melissa Moore (no relation to Erica Moore) said.
By April, the couple was back, staking claim to another abandoned boat. While the city has offered berthing assistance for the boats to relocate, that requires proof of insurance and registration, which poses a financial challenge for the couple. Shields and Crowell would also have to apply for live-aboard status to occupy their boat full time.
“They just found a thriving community in the marina, down at the decommissioned boat docks, and they were really doing well,” Melissa Moore said. “They weren’t trying to be anything other than just living.”
For many, the most frustrating part is that it appears the city did not need to close the marina so early. The city, which said the marina was closed because it had fallen into disrepair, has not specified exactly why it failed to maintain the area.
In February, Cal-Coast defaulted on a portion of the Monarch Bay Shoreline development, the Bay Area News Group previously reported. The developer purchased the 15.9-acre portion of land using a $24.9 million loan that it received from the city of San Leandro itself.
According to Sanftner, the Cal-Coast legal entity that defaulted on the loan filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June, and the city anticipates that the bankruptcy process, which allows companies to restructure their debt, will last at least nine months.
“Presently, city staff has been in ongoing coordination with Cal-Coast on efforts to obtain permitting approvals and continue to do so during the bankruptcy process,” said Tom Liao, the city’s community development director, in an email shared with the Bay Area News Group.
Melissa Moore finds it difficult to understand why the marina was closed if the development has stalled and “nothing’s going to be done with the marina for quite some time.”
“For what, San Leandro?” Melissa Moore asked. “For what? To get a beautiful view out your window at the cost of taxpayer money (at the) cost of people’s lives being traumatized over and over again?”
While Erica Moore supports the city’s recent enforcement of municipal codes, “a really great place for them to start right now is finding somewhere for these people to go legally and not just saying ‘you have to move,’” she said. “I just hope that they do it the right way for the people who are living there and the people who want to be able to use the marina.”