Houseboating Adventures - Issue 17 - (Page 13) The strategy worked, but it may have been the beginning of what many long-time houseboaters see as the end: gentrification. Thanks in part to a concentration of Microsoft millionaires (the company's headquarters are nearby) a houseboat-mooring alone on Lake Union can cost $700,000, a price to which some of the new houses - boxy, albeit buoyant, things, complete with stars and stripes - will add another $1m. In London, people seeking alternative affordable accommodation have been dismayed to find a narrowboat costs little less than a flat; the same disappointing scenario applies in Amsterdam. The houseboat pioneers must feel theirs is a familiar story. Like loft living in Manhattan and warehouse dwelling in Hoxton, east London, artists and other creative livers carved out alternative abodes only to be pursued by types with ample money but less soul. But houseboaters may yet have a kind of revenge. The advocates of the floating life at the centre of the Amsterdam exhibition complain that, on houseboats, the staid mores of settled life still prevail. "Generally speaking," as Jord den Hollander writes in the exhibition book, "'who floats stays' still hold true." He sees in the essential mobility of houseboats the potential for "a completely groundbreaking urbanity, where public squares, cinemas and playgrounds" could follow the population, rather than the reverse. Disused, windswept sporting fields could, he suggests, become a thing of the past. He envisages "[a] city with an ever-changing face precisely the image that every port city used to have in its heyday". The old salts of houseboating might have another, slyer satisfaction at the appropriation of their way of life. Living on these latterday arks is not as suited to rugged individualists as you might think. There are not only the risks rare on dry land - of sinking and collision and the constant struggle, as described by one Amsterdam houseboater, Maarten Kloos, against "rust, rot, algae, dirt and mussels". There is also, a mere gangplank away from your neighbor, "no privacy whatsoever". Once balanced on your sea legs, twitching lace curtains must be a breeze. To see this story with its related links on the SocietyGuardian.co.uk site, go to http://www.societyguardian.co.uk END> Editors Note: We also received a very interesting article from the Netherlands on a new approach to floating homes see the next page. )6B@" A05("%C&5AB9&@ http://SocietyGuardian.co.uk http://www.society-guardian.co.uk http://www.society-guardian.co.uk http://www.davismarineinsurance.com http://www.davismarineinsurance.com
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