Homeless people should be given shelter on cruise ship, California official suggests

A local official in California has proposed using a cruise ship to tackle the growing homelessness crisis.

Rebecca Kaplan, the president of Oakland City Council, said docking a vessel in the harbour could create up to 1,000 beds for rough sleepers.

Oakland, which lies across the bay from San Francisco, has seen the numbers of homeless people rocket in recent years.

There are now thought to be about 3,200 people without a home in the city of 430,000, up 47 per cent in just two years.

“It could be a great way to house a lot of people quickly,” Ms Kaplan told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Cruise ships have been used for emergency housing after natural disasters and for extra housing for things like Olympics.”

Her proposal, which she plans to formally put before the Oakland City Council in January, would see a privately owned cruise ship docked in the port and its rooms rented to those designated by the authorities has having nowhere else to live.

The scheme would not cost the council much, Ms Kaplan argued, as each person would pay for their room based on their income.

Along with the rest of California, homelessness in Oakland has become an urgent concern. Clusters of rough tent settlements regularly crop up underneath motorways and overpasses, leading the police and authorities to have chase rough sleepers from neighbourhood to neighbourhood.

“They relocate to the next underpass and a month later, at great expense to the city, the cops are called out again to remove them,” Ms Kaplan told USA Today.

“This is creating a huge amount of expenditure and taking people away from other things they need to be doing, and at the end of the day nothing has changed for all that time, and trouble and money.

“We say this is an emergency. So, I thought, well, we have a natural-disaster level of crisis. Now I am in dialogue with people who can actually do something.”

The councillor claims she has already been contacted by cruise ship companies interested in taking part.

However, the port in Oakland has poured cold water on the idea, saying it is entirely untenable.

Mike Zampa, a spokesman for the port, told the San Francisco Chronicle there were no facilities for cruise ships at the port, which was only designed to take commercial cargo ships.

“Safety and security issues at the federally regulated maritime facilities would make residential uses untenable,” he added, noting there was no way to hook up a ship with water and electricity.

“You can’t have unauthorised personnel walking back and forth through marine terminals – those are federally regulated facilities, you need a badge to get in and out. There is also a lot of big and heavy equipment rumbling over those facilities all day long,” he said.

Ms Kaplan’s idea is not entirely novel, however. In 2017 a tech entrepreneur suggested using a cruise ship to tackle San Francisco’s own homelessness crisis across the bay.

And last year, Dublin’s council confirmed it was looking into the idea of renting out rooms on a cruise ship to house the city’s homeless.

The council’s chief executive told the national Irish government they would be unable to meet targets on providing extra accommodation for the city’s 1,400 homeless families unless they were allowed to pursue more unorthodox ideas, such as the cruise liner.