Micro Week is about more than tiny homes. We're thinking small in virtually every way possible, including city planning. Here we take a survey of some of the smallest towns in the Bay Area, many of them also some of the itty bittiest in the entire state of California.
However minuscule, each town has a story to tell, a reason earlier Californians settled there in the first place and reasons modern Californians continue on there still.
It can be difficult to gauge the population of towns this size: If someone lives five miles outside the town limits but comes in to work and pick up their mail there every day, do we count them in the town's population or not? A town like Marshall may have as many as 200 people or as few as 50. We did our best to nail down some figures, but populations can change a lot in between censuses.
Two towns get honorable mentions: First, the town of Holy City, founded by a cult leader in Santa Clara County in 1919 as a white supremacist stronghold. It's been abandoned for decades and bought and sold wholesale many times, including just a month ago (for a reported $21 billion). There's no official population, but there may yet be some squatters.
Additionally, Bolinas is too big to quite make the list, but deserves special mention for its recluse reputation, doing away with even road signs and to keep out of towners (and developers) at arm's length.
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