Off-grid hippie commune or a necessary haven for poor, homeless families priced out of housing market?
The property owner is a dysfunctional POS, but JFC, the Board of Supervisors let this hazard exist for two decades? Networks of connected extension cords (extreme fire hazard) powering a village of RVs and "structures" without a sewage system. They let the most dysfunctional landlord in California thrive for over 20 years, FFS! And I swear, this isn't a stealth scat thread, but the owner in question may very well be a fetishist. Can't it be buried or burned?
[QUOTE]Tucked off Highway 101 through a tunnel of fern and forest, the property became a refuge for people priced out of Humboldt’s punishing housing market. According to the California Housing Partnership, Humboldt County renters must earn 1.5 times the state minimum wage to afford the average rent, while 85% of extremely low-income households spend more than half of their income on housing.
[QUOTE]That sense of refuge has long clashed with the county’s findings. Inspectors first cited the property in 2001, uncovering 15 unpermitted structures riddled with hazards — unsafe stairways, faulty wiring, and wood stoves without ventilation. Recreational vehicles were powered by extension cords and heated with stoves inside. A 2021 sweep tagged 14 “junk vehicles,” some occupied and storing *barrels of human waste(.
[QUOTE]By November 2024, public health inspectors deemed the site an [/italic]urgent health hazard. They found toilets emptying into barrels, a tarp covering yards of sewage[/italic] and a “complex web” of water lines running between 21 structures — many at ground level and [italic]dangerously close to waste[/italic]. With Trinidad’s heavy rains, officials warned that untreated sewage could wash directly into Trinidad Bay.
[QUOTE]Photographs of Yee Haw published by Humboldt County reveal the disorder in startling detail: a jumble of structures crafted from scavenged materials, including school buses topped with canoes and a chimney; RVs with riveted metal hulls coated in a green patina after years beneath redwoods; a yurt fused with a protruding side addition; and a two-story house with brightly painted trim but an unfinished rear wall. One squat, pagoda-like dwelling featured natural wood siding and tapestries for windows. [Italic]Inspectors also documented several 50-gallon drums filled with what appeared to be human waste.[/italic]
| by Anonymous | reply 8 | October 2, 2025 10:28 PM
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^ Sorry, I messed up the italics. Insomnia is no one's friend.
| by Anonymous | reply 1 | October 2, 2025 10:37 AM
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I dunno, Trinidad and that entire stretch of coast in Humboldt county is one of the creepiest places I've ever visited. We bolted after one night in Arcata. There was a homeless festival in the grocery store parking lot, no one manning the hotel desk, it wasn't raining but the atmosphere was... drenched. I think maybe we should leave these ten people alone.
| by Anonymous | reply 2 | October 2, 2025 11:20 AM
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On reading the headline and the image of the quirky hippie shack, I was initially inclined to say leave them alone.
[quote]uncovering 15 unpermitted structures riddled with hazards — unsafe stairways, faulty wiring, and wood stoves without ventilation.
Of course the structures are unpermitted, and if someone wants to live in a shack in the woods, a too steep stairway or hinky wiring would seem to be part of the picture. But the rest of the article and the many photos paint a more difficult picture. Living as an adult among barrels of your own human waste is a problem in a city apartment building, obviously, but obviously, too, if other people and their children and living among open cesspits and barrels of shit and heating and next to no regard for human safety, let alone environmental consequences.
I don't think hippies in an off-grid commune need the same level the same level of building and sanitary code enforcement...but they need enforcement at some basic level. A quirky handmade hippie stairway with uneven risers and treads would be a nuisance to me, but people live in old houses with ceiling heights and door widths and tread heights that don't meet modern codes and so they are accepted as existing conditions. If a place is big enough to be considered a "community," it should have some basic level of health and safety oversight. I have friends who have formed communities and reclaimed abandoned small villages. They are hippieish architects and government executives and part-time construction works and waiters and small business owners and they are able to achieve some medium ground on what constitutes new construction and what are repairs, but they are happy to attend to all of the regulations regarding water supply and waste and other finndamental considerations.
| by Anonymous | reply 3 | October 2, 2025 12:53 PM
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Good post R3 thank you.
What irks me about this is the micro focus on unhoused people while the basic housing crisis is underplayed. I agree that if we're talking about a settlement large enough to be a what's called a community there should be legally enforced standards. It's just weird to me that this is an issue in one of the poorest counties in California and I'm a 'native' Californian, instead of focusing on the economics of that region, which are tanking.
| by Anonymous | reply 4 | October 2, 2025 1:43 PM
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Better they are shitting in a barrel in the woods than by the dumpster at Dollar Tree
| by Anonymous | reply 5 | October 2, 2025 1:47 PM
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The homeless need to head a few miles south to Ferndale and trash that town as payback for giving the world Guy Fieri.
| by Anonymous | reply 7 | October 2, 2025 2:47 PM
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Or go further south to Santa Rosa where Guy has quite a bit of property. Drier weather, too.
| by Anonymous | reply 8 | October 2, 2025 10:28 PM
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