OUR STORY:
CURATED ARCHIVE
Browse some of our historical artifacts.
We have an open, full archive here, although we thought you might like to see some of our best pieces of our history curated below.
Our houseboats were in Life Magazine in 1946.
In 1985, volunteers Beth Means and Jann McFarland wrote a cookbook full of recipes, humor and floating home life. Scroll in the window and grab some recipes and tall tales.
Feel free to peer into one of our many photo libraries to view floating home life.
Here are stacks of digitized Floating Homes Newsletters dating back to the early 1960s. (For the historians and paper lovers among us, the original physical copies are still available to view at the Floating Homes Museum in Keasler Cottage).These archives are so much more than old neighborhood updates—they are the firsthand diaries of our community's survival. They chronicle what it meant to live on the water back when floating homes were dismissed as "shacktowns" and inhabited by loggers, fishermen, and free spirits.
As you read through them, you'll see the real-time accounts of the existential threats we faced in the 1960s and 70s. City officials labeled our homes "cesspools" and targeted us for demolition under urban renewal, while developers fought to wipe us off the lake to build high-rise condos. We faced mass evictions, 400% moorage fee hikes, and the very real possibility that Seattle's floating homes would go extinct.
But these pages also document exactly how we fought back and won. You'll read about the birth of the Floating Homes Association in 1962, our legal battles that went all the way to the State Supreme Court, and the sheer determination it took to build our own sewer connections and buy our docks collectively as co-ops. There are useable learnings about organizing and fighting "power" buried deep in these archives that we can use in even (or especially?) today.
The Gentrification of Bohemia: Change in Seattle’s Houseboat Community
​in June 1994 Donald Wysocki
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The document, "The Gentrification of Bohemia: Change in Seattle's Houseboat Community" by Donald Wysocki (June 1994), is a Master's Thesis examining the dramatic social and physical transformation of Seattle's houseboat community over the three decades leading up to 1994. Historically, the community was often seen as "bohemian," "unsanitary," and working-class, facing recurring threats of abolishment from city officials and upland residents. The core argument is that the community's eventual survival and shift to desirability was a unique case of urban gentrification, initiated primarily by the city's formal recognition of houseboats in 1962 and the approval of a sanitary sewer in 1963. These political and infrastructural changes created the necessary economic stability, making houseboat living acceptable and accessible to a new, affluent demographic.
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This newfound stability and marketability led to rapid physical upgrading of the houseboats and a significant demographic shift, as evidenced by a 1994 survey. The new residents were overwhelmingly well-educated, held professional/managerial occupations, and had high rates of owner-occupancy, contrasting sharply with the community's working-class past. However, this process had the consequence of economically displacing many original residents due to costs from maintenance, moorage fee increases, and the rise of condominium moorages. Ultimately, the study concludes that while this unique "urban village" followed the economic patterns of typical gentrification, its sustained existence was also deeply rooted in the strong "sense of community" that both the "old" and "new" residents valued.​
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