Floating radical ideas to ease homelessness
Housing on ship may sound absurd, but bolder action needed
I was cruising down Oakland’s Broadway recently, nodding my head to music and feeling good about going home to South Carolina to see family and friends.
My heart sank when I saw a woman curled up on a cardboard box. Nothing remarkable, right? We see this every day on our sidewalks and streets. But this woman didn’t have on any pants, sleeping with her underwear and troubles exposed to people walking by on their way to downing overpriced brunch mimosas.
I thought: The Bay Area is drowning in homelessness, and it will take radical solutions to solve this titanic problem.
This month, Oakland City Council President Rebecca Kaplan floated the idea of getting a cruise ship to the city’s port to house up to 1,000 homeless people.
I know, I know — it sounds ridiculous.
But is it any more outlandish than housing people, many of whom have been criminalized for being poor, in a former jail?
When Kaplan pushed her idea at the Oakland Life Enrichment Committee meeting on homelessness, several people in the audience scoffed. They really missed the boat, because right now we need all hands — and ideas — on deck for homelessness.
Look, I doubt we’ll see homeless people boarding a cruise ship, but I support casting a wider net in hopes of catching something that will actually work.
“Some people thought it was funny,” Kaplan said. “All of that is fine, because we have to be willing to try a lot more than what we’ve been trying. And if people laugh, that’s OK because it’s my job to bring forth real solutions.”
Homelessness isn’t a laughing matter.
An estimated 4,000 homeless people are sleeping in tents, cars and RVs in Oakland. The city’s homelessness rate is now 940 per 100,000 population, slightly higher than San Francisco, at 906, and Berkeley, at 898.
Oakland’s homeless population accounts for nearly half of Alameda County’s total. What’s more, 57% of homeless people surveyed as part of the county’s pointintime count said they’d lived in the county for more than a decade.
They have roots in local communities. They can’t just be shipped out of town.
Even if a cruise ship isn’t realistic, the next wave of homeless solutions should be bolder and bigger because what Oakland’s doing now to reduce homelessness isn’t working.
In 2018, a $9 million pilot plan called Keep Oakland Housed was started to provide residents at risk of homelessness emergency rent checks and legal representation. It’s keeping people in their homes.
This year, the city opened a safe RV parking site in East Oakland, near the Coliseum BART Station. It has security, a fulltime site manager, portable toilets and wash stations. The city is planning more sites for vehicle dwellers in front of Home Depot’s store in the Fruitvale neighborhood and on Wood Street in West Oakland.
I’m in favor of the Tuff Shed pipeline program to move people from tents to storage sheds to permanent housing. But in the two years since the program launched, just over half of the people accepted into the program have gotten housing. As of Dec. 19, of the 590 people who have moved into a Tuff Shed site, only 174 have moved into permanent housing, while 62 are in transitional housing.
Yes, there has been some success, but it’s a drop in the ocean when compared with this: For every person who gets housed in the county, two more people become homeless.
In 2005, cruise ships offered temporary housing for about 8,000 people displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
When we talked, Kaplan brought up the Queen Mary, an 83yearold ocean liner that was once the benchmark of luxurious, transatlantic travel. The ship is now docked in Long Beach, a love boat with 347 hotel rooms.
“The thing about cruise ships is that they already exist, and they can be docked without needing to find land to build them, which takes time,” she said. “We absolutely should be working on cruise ships.”
But, as my colleague Sarah Ravani reported, Mike Zampa, a spokesman for the port, said that having a cruise ship berthed at the port poses safety and security issues.
Homelessness poses safety and security issues for the housed and unhoused. In Oakland, the tide is changing because homeless people and their supporters have begun pushing back against being pushed around the city.
We need fresh ideas and initiatives that get people off the street faster.