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Over the past decade, the number of people in California has grown three times faster than the number of homes, throwing the state deep into a housing crisis. In 2019, Rebecca Kaplan, Oakland’s city council president at the time, floated a plan to address the issue: using a cruise ship to shelter 1,000 of the city’s 4,000 people who lacked housing. Unusual as it sounds, Kaplan’s scheme was a familiar one in the Bay Area. In 2017, a San Francisco tech entrepreneur who has made disparaging comments about houseless people proposed converting a cruise ship to lodge 500 people. In 2016, also in San Francisco, former mayor Art Agnos put forth a similar scheme but with an aircraft carrier. Kaplan’s idea—like the others—never got out of dry dock: the city’s port said the idea was untenable.

Yet the sharp collapse of the cruise industry with the ongoing pandemic—which has seen dozens of ships head for the scrapyard in just a few years—has revitalized the discussion of what to do with out-of-work cruise ships.

However unrealistic the port thought the scheme, experts say the idea of converting cruise ships into affordable housing is an interesting one. There are a lot of good reasons why we might want to consider it—even if all the details haven’t been sorted out just yet.

Washington, DC–based architecture company CallisonRTKL has investigated the idea of turning old ships into housing—including affordable housing—and even surveyed 362 adults of different socioeconomic backgrounds in Florida about it. They found that 44 percent of respondents said they would be interested in living on a converted cruise ship, while an additional 44 percent said maybe. Generally, support was highest in single people between the ages of 41 and 51 who make at least US $100,000 per year.

Another advocate for the idea, California-based architect Chris Craiker, says he was spurred by the state’s housing crisis to explore what it would take to retrofit a cruise ship, and penned an article about it laying out his vision.

The best candidates for renovation, Craiker says, are ships between five and 10 years old. But even these relatively modern ships would require some work to turn cramped cruise cabins into something you’d want to call home.

“My opinion is these would mostly be used for housing working families,” Craiker says. But retirees looking for seaside—seaworthy—living are also likely candidates, he notes. “You’d probably end up combining two or three units together to make them into apartments with sleeping facilities and kitchens, and of course bathrooms and such.”

Once the inside is overhauled, Craiker says, the ship will also need utilities. Most already have internet, and it’s becoming increasingly common within the industry to connect a cruise ship to a city’s power grid like the world’s largest RV. Cruise ships could be retrofitted with solar panels, Craiker says. But sewage and water supply would need to be sorted out, he adds.

It’s hard to say how much renovating a cruise ship in this way would cost, simply because no one has ever done it. In one particularly large and thorough renovation in 2019, however, Royal Caribbean paid $115-million to overhaul the 4,000-room Navigator of the Seas. For comparison, building a new 240-unit high-rise in landlocked Alberta at the same time cost a little over $40-million. According to Craiker, it’s possible that renovating a ship could be cheaper per unit than building a new apartment complex, but there are a lot of factors to consider.

According to Christian Kopp, a transport policy officer with the Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union, a German environmental organization that regularly studies the cruise industry, there is also an environmental rationale behind the approach. Globally, shipping accounts for 2.5 percent of all carbon emissions. Cruise ships only produce a small part of those emissions, says Kopp, but “especially compared to the more economically important container ships,” their necessity is questionable.

It seems unlikely that the world’s cruise ship fleet will be converted into homes, but if providing an alternate use for these ships helps usher a few into early retirement, it could have a range of environmental benefits. Kopp notes that cruise ships bring a slew of other issues as well. Most use heavy fuel, which can contain up to 3,500 times more sulfur than automobile diesel. They also produce substantial noise pollution that can stress marine wildlife. Many of these issues could be resolved if they were anchored as apartment buildings.

Elizabeth English, an architect at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and founder of the Buoyant Foundation Project, who studies amphibious homes as a way to deal with sea level rise, says the idea has some other potential benefits as well. When a flood or hurricane hits a coastal city, she says, a converted cruise liner could be deployed as temporary emergency housing. English notes that cruise ships, being boats, are resistant to the flooding that some coastal cities are grappling with.

“They accommodate sea level rise by nature. That’s not an issue for them,” she says. “Maybe they could take on the people who are displaced by sea level rise.”

Whether port cities will embark down this path remains to be seen. Craiker, for one, is at least somewhat optimistic. “It could be very, very doable,” he says. “Finding the ship and finding the port: that’s the challenge.”