Oakland’s City Council president wants to explore the possibility of using a cruise ship to house up to 1,000 homeless people as a way of addressing the city’s affordable housing and homelessness crisis.
Rebecca Kaplan told a council meeting Tuesday that the ship would be brought to the Port of Oakland, but port officials were quick to call the plan “untenable.”
“We respect President Kaplan’s desire to address homelessness, but Port of Oakland docks are designed to work cargo ships. There isn’t the infrastructure to berth a cruise ship,” port spokesman Mike Zampa said on Wednesday.
Oakland’s port is one of the nation’s busiest, and safety and security issues in the federally regulated facilities “would make residential uses untenable,” Zampa said.
Kaplan didn’t immediately return a request for further comment.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Kaplan said she had been contacted by cruise ship companies about providing a vessel for emergency housing, and that the companies were reaching out to the port about what options might exist to berth a ship there, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. She didn’t provide further details on those companies.
“Maybe we can have a way to create a 1,000 housing units overnight,” Kaplan said.
She added that she plans to present a proposal to the council in January that will be “no or low” cost to the city because residents of the cruise ship would pay for rooms based on their income, and the city would not actually buy the vessel.
Homelessness has spiked in Oakland, according to this year’s point-in-time count, which found that the number of people living in unsheltered conditions jumped from roughly 1,900 to more than 3,200 in the last two years.
