As enormous wealth lives always side by side with abject poverty, it’s no surprise that Pebble Beach has a healthy homeless population. Since most of the work available (making beds, scrubbing floors, blowing leaves, etc.) doesn’t come close to paying for housing, many people live in cars and vans, parked unobtrusively at night in residential neighborhoods. Others seek shelter in the woods.
With the economic downturn resulting in the Pebble Beach Co. and private homeowners reducing their workforces over the past year, some of Pebble Beach’s best homeless residences are now vacant and available. But with upwards of 5,000 Sybarites paying astronomical rates to taste the world’s finest wines and sample the world’s rarest epicurean treats (including, according to The Herald, 110 pounds of halibut cheeks, 3,000 live snails purged on corn meal and basil, veal tongues paired with grapefruit curd, etc.) in Pebble Beach this weekend, and with the U.S. Open coming to Pebble Beach this summer, the opportunities for underpaid work are surely on the rise again already.
With that in mind, we thought we’d take the opportunity to present two of the finest Pebble Beach homeless residences currently vacant and available …
Hidden Arches
If absolute privacy is your top priority, this masterpiece of design is for you. Carefully hidden and massively camouflaged, you won’t have to worry about unwanted visitors here. Yet this is no dank den or cave.
After crawling through the entrance hole, you’ll find that the large rear opening admits all the light and fresh air you could possibly want – while cleverly protected from prying eyes by a completely impenetrable thicket. Surely this structure goes farther in complying with the Local Coastal Plan Policy requiring houses to be “subordinate to the landscape” than any other home in Pebble Beach.
Rustic Comfort
Minimalist luxury at its finest. A single design element – a narrow metal bed – placed in the middle of a small, hidden clearing. Just as other Pebble Beach homeowners go to immense trouble and expense to import rock from Italy and France, the creator of this residence clearly put a lot of effort into dragging this heavy steel bed and springs through the thick brush surrounding the place. There’s a blue water view available if you know where to look and even room to pitch a small tent on rainy nights!
Xasáuan Today 
Such a poignant story this tells. I remember well the homeless camps along Carmel River, and the “cleaning” them out several times a year. I hope your post doesn’t inadvertently lead to a similar “cleansing” of those homeless who call Pebble Beach “home.”
We hope so too, and we almost gave up on this post for that reason. After thinking it over, though, we decided that calling attention to the problem of working people in the wealthiest part of our community being unable to afford shelter was important enough to be worth the risk. We hope we were right. The decision was based, in part, on the fact that the homeless in Pebble Beach tend to be solitary (rather than in camps) and very well hidden. We doubt the “authorities” have the patience for the kind of searching that would be necessary to find them and we certainly hope this post doesn’t inspire anyone to try. Although we doubt the places will be found, we waited several months before posting to be sure the two homeless “residences” featured here were truly abandoned. – XT
Thanks; you strike a fine balance between sssh… & the brutal truth. I’m writing from Santa Cruz, where the differential between the rich & the decidedly non- is growing apace.
Thanks for the tour of the labor camps of Pebble Beach, XT. Truth be told, if someone offered me the choice of a suite at the Pebble Beach Lodge or that cozy little cot ‘neath cypress and huckleberry, I think I’d opt for the latter. That leaping stag motif on the bedspread reminds me of my childhood, and there’s plenty of room for my bindle under the bed. It sure looks like a quiet and relaxing place to lay it down for a while, with the soothing sound of the distant surf as a lullaby.
I wouldn’t count too much on the police’s lack of patience. Over the years I’ve seen numerous solitary bed sites in the hills above Berkeley, some very well hidden, that get found and destroyed by University of California police. I lived that way for several yrs myself, but was always very careful to get up before dawn and hide ALL my gear away every morning. In a well camouflaged hollow under leaves inside a dense cover of swordferns. Too many folks unfortunately don’t have that foresight.
i can’t tell you my places