After decades of defiance, a California hippie commune is defeated

After 25 years of warnings, fines and broken promises, Humboldt County supervisors finally voted last week to crack down on the infamous Yee Haw commune. Their unanimous decision set in motion plans to clear the 10-acre property of unpermitted structures and hazards, a move that would displace the approximate 10 residents who currently call it home and strip longtime owner Charles Garth of control. Officials say the site is riddled with environmental dangers and dotted with ramshackle dwellings that fail to meet even the most basic safety standards.

Less than nine months before, Garth had stood at the supervisors’ dais, pleading for more time. He promised to pay down thousands in fees and bring the property into compliance. The board granted him that grace period. But last Tuesday, supervisors made clear their patience had run out.

“We had a yearlong plan to go through the steps in this process, and those things didn’t happen,” Fourth District Supervisor Natalie Arroyo said. “... We need to take a different approach today.” First District Supervisor Rex Bohn was even blunter: “Nothing, nada, nothing has happened.”

Home or health hazard?

For residents, Yee Haw has provided freedom, community and a foothold in the forested hills east of Trinidad. 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. Against that backdrop, Garth’s patchwork of makeshift homes offered an alternative.

In September 2024, resident Michael Reeves begged the board not to shut the place down. “It’s going to put me and my wife and my two kids out on the street,” he said. While traditional housing proved impossible to secure, Garth and Yee Haw opened their doors: “Instead of a day-to-day spent surviving on the streets of Eureka, Yee Haw allowed my children to grow up around trees, not concrete and not addiction.”

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.

By November 2024, public health inspectors deemed the site an “urgent health hazard.” They found toilets emptying into barrels, a tarp covering yards of sewage and a “complex web” of water lines running between 21 structures — many at ground level and dangerously close to waste. With Trinidad’s heavy rains, officials warned that untreated sewage could wash directly into Trinidad Bay.

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. Inspectors also documented several 50-gallon drums filled with what appeared to be human waste. 

‘This whole thing is a mess’

Humboldt County Planning and Building Director John Ford briefed supervisors last week on the stalled progress. In late 2024, Garth had sought to rezone the land under emergency housing provisions meant to ease Humboldt’s housing crisis. Staff acknowledged some progress — the installation of portable toilets and handwashing stations and “good faith” efforts from Garth to cooperate. But the property still lacked water and wastewater hookups, disqualifying it from being zoned as an “emergency housing village.”

Even then, the county bent further, floating the idea of amending the zoning code itself to make Yee Haw eligible — an extraordinary concession that would have allowed rezoning once the commune’s homes were permitted and utilities deemed safe. But nearly nine months later, Ford reported, no applications had been submitted, no septic testing completed, and none of the $63,000 in penalties paid. “Planning and Building will be reengaging in the code enforcement process unless the board directs us otherwise,” Ford told supervisors.

Garth, wearing a worn leather cowboy hat, his beard gray and hair down to his shoulders, strode to the microphone. “I want a new deal. This whole thing is a mess,” he said. He insisted he had “put up a bunch of money” for rezoning that seemed to have “disappeared.” Ford had “stated numerous times that there’s no way to build affordable housing,” Garth said, and cast himself as the solution: “I can build affordable housing all day long, till the cows come home. I can build it. Just let me do it.”

Advocates echoed him. Nichole Norris, a former Yee Haw tenant, told the board: “The heart of the matter today, though, is that affordable housing is very needed.” Another speaker said the commune was “way more safe than being on the street” and praised Garth for taking in “so many homeless children, families, elders and people.” One described the county’s crackdown as “unjust” and an effort to deny people “security and water.”

Others defended Garth himself. One commenter argued “Charles is not made for bureaucracy,” pointing out that he had attempted required septic testing but “just did it wrong because he doesn’t know what he’s doing.” By his measure, Garth’s talents lie elsewhere: “He can bring back your car to life. He can fix anything that’s broken in your house. Charles is the guy you want when stuff’s falling apart.”

No supervisor has been more patient with Garth than Fifth District Supervisor Steve Madrone, who represents Trinidad and the surrounding area. For years, Madrone gave Garth and his tenants chance after chance to turn a new leaf. Last Tuesday, the tone shifted. “I have gone to bat for this community for my entire six and a half years up here as a board member over and over again,” he said. He credited residents for pitching in with the “cleanup on the property, gathering up debris, etc., and loading dumpsters and other kinds of things.”

Then he drew the line. “Promises keep being made, but then they don’t get fulfilled,” Madrone said. Of the $62,000 in fines and penalties Garth owed — which he had promised to begin paying back in January — none had been paid, according to the county. To critics who argued the county was being too heavy-handed, Madrone pushed back: “Where were they earlier in the process when that could have actually made a difference? That’s always kind of confusing for me. If everybody cares so much about all this, why not step up and deal with all that?”

‘What’s the definition of insanity?’

The day’s biggest twist came when supervisors learned Garth was no longer the official owner of Yee Haw. Through a quitclaim deed, the title had been transferred to a nonprofit called Evergreen. Allen Ng, who introduced himself nervously as a board member of the organization, said Evergreen intended to use the land as “a training facility” with “beds and … living quarters” where “workers learn tree climbing to go into the trees to gather the redwood seeds.”

The explanation baffled supervisors. Third District Supervisor Mike Wilson said he was “confused” how such a facility aligned with any of the zoning paths Garth had pursued. Madrone warned Ng about the “big liability you’ve taken on here,” noting the property would require hundreds of thousands of dollars in cleanup “to deal with, like now.”

Under sharper questioning, the nonprofit’s structure came into focus: Evergreen’s CEO was none other than James Garth, Charles Garth’s son, whose name appeared on the quitclaim deed. To Bohn, the first district supervisor, the transfer was little more than misdirection. “This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a shell game,” he said. 

Bohn reminded colleagues this wasn’t the first time Garth had shifted his problems elsewhere. When ordered to remove nuisance vehicles from Yee Haw, Bohn said, Garth just hauled them 35 miles south to Loleta and “dumped them on an empty lot.”

For Bohn, the past quarter-century is evidence enough that the county’s approach had failed. “What’s the definition of insanity — doing the same thing over and over again?” he asked. 

Arroyo agreed: “I am ready to get to some kind of consensus today and have a decision and not kick the same can down the road.”

Bohn made the motion: “We move forward after 25 years — I’ll repeat that, 25 years — with the abatement program,” starting with “removing some of the junk, make sure everything’s out of there, and start the abatement process.” The motion passed unanimously, 5-0.

For Norris, the former Yee Haw resident and longtime advocate, the board’s decision raises a larger question: “If the county can force people off private property who are not doing anything wrong … this could happen to anyone?” In a statement to SFGATE, she called the fight over Yee Haw a “David v. Goliath situation at the root” and acknowledged that the commune “may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it beats the streets.” 

In an email to SFGATE, Ford clarified that the board’s decision last week gave Garth 14 days to “come into compliance at which point the abatement process would begin.” The county must first declare the property substandard and then relocate residents before demolition and cleanup. If Garth appeals, the process will be delayed, but within 60 to 90 days, the county expects to focus on “addressing the needs of the residents and making certain they have housing.”

Ford said tenants could receive eviction notices as early as spring 2026, with demolition of structures and cleanup of the area beginning around the same time. Ultimately, the county could either place the property in the hands of a court-appointed receiver to oversee repairs or undertake the cleanup itself and charge the costs back to the owner.

The path forward, Ford emphasized, “depends on what the property owner chooses to do.” He added: “Hopefully, the property owner will resolve the violations in the next 14 days.”