Greg Gopman hopes to get up to 500 off San Francisco’s streets by moving them offshore – but could his past comments about the homeless sink the project?

Greg Gopman is a technology entrepreneur with a solution for San Francisco’s homelessness crisis. It is not your usual shelter or affordable housing. It is a cruise ship.

Docked in the bay, it could house as many as 500 homeless people. Some of its funding will come from renting cabins on Airbnb – or, as Gopman calls it, Shipbnb.

He says he has discussed the idea with San Francisco’s top homelessness official and a former mayor of the city and is about to go public with it. But he foresees a roadblock: himself. “It’s very possible [that] for this thing to happen, people would have reservations about me being involved.”

In 2013, Gopman, then head of a company that organized hackathons, complained on Facebook about the “homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash” he encountered in San Francisco. “The degenerates gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you,” he wrote. “There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us.”

In a city attuned to the class divide sharpened by Silicon Valley wealth, it reverberated widely. A Gawker writer said Gopman offered “no apparent utility or value to our planet”. The New York Times cited his case in a piece on the Valley’s “wayward moral compass”.

The number of homeless people living in San Francisco has risen slightly over the past decade – about 6,700 people were counted on one night in 2015. The city has won acclaim for a new kind of short-term shelter, called the Navigation Center, which welcomes people from the streets along with their spouses and pets. But there are few available sites for them, and there is a shortage of permanent housing for residents to move into at the end of their stay.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Plans for the ship. Photograph: Handout

There is a precedent for the cruise ship plan. Gopman was inspired by Art Agnos, who became mayor of San Francisco in 1988, the year before a 6.9-magnitude earthquake led to the collapse of part of the Bay Bridge. It also displaced hundreds of homeless people who were temporarily resettled on the USS Peleliu, an amphibious assault ship.

“We did it in two days during an earthquake when there was a human emergency, and that’s what I think we have right here today,” Agnos said. While the optics of moving homeless people offshore are unfavorable, “we’re not trying to get rid of them. We’re trying to get them indoors where it’s a more humane place for people to live.”

We did it in two days during an earthquake when there was a human emergency, and that’s what I think we have here today Art Agnos, former San Francisco mayor

Another city has also considered cruise ships: New York. In 2002, Linda Gibbs, then commissioner of homeless services, toured boats in the Caribbean. She was impressed – “there’s so much gorgeous shared space,” she recalled – but the plan foundered on issues such as fire safety procedures and finding a berth. “I just felt uncomfortable seeing a large number of homeless people isolated on the end of a dock,” she said.

Gopman, 33, is from Miami and has lived in San Francisco since 2011. Although he does not try to make light of his Facebook comments, in a recent interview at a San Francisco cafe he said they were prompted partly by his own “traumas”: seeing a woman with diarrhea relieve herself, walking past people he described as drug dealers who would “bully” him. “I only saw one side of it at the time,” he said. “That boy didn’t know what this man knows now.”

After his public lambasting, it was hard for people to see him as “not poisonous”. He went to Burning Man (where “everyone is accepted and there’s no shame”) and immersed himself in homelessness issues. “I felt like I owed a debt,” he said. He volunteered, organized a town hall event, and came up with an off-the-wall solution involving geodesic domes.

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In late 2016, a tech blog published a post expressing surprise that he had been hired at Twitter to work on virtual reality technology. Gopman said he had learned about the story while attending a homelessness event. “Anddd I’m fired,” he wrote on Facebook, though it was reported elsewhere that he had left the company because his contract was up. A week later, in a post titled My Greg Gopman Story, the head of a local not-for-profit organization said Gopman had worked “tirelessly” on homelessness and that his efforts had helped create 22 full-time jobs and move three people off the streets.

Gopman, who has been on about 10 cruises, said the inspiration came to him after reading an op-ed written by Agnos and meeting with him. Gopman has his eye on a 13-deck craft that was retrofitted for use in the Mediterranean refugee crisis and is available for $13m.

He envisions people staying for a maximum of two years and offering them job training and personal development programs to lift them out of low income brackets. The goals are lofty: he believes “someone who’s homeless can be a computer developer at Google”.

The reaction has been mixed. Gopman said the city’s lead homelessness official had told him he was also exploring a boat-based solution and was planning to present it to the mayor. The official, Jeff Kositsky, was not available for an interview, and a spokesperson, Randy Quezada, said he could not confirm any of these details. “We should look at every idea that comes our way,” Quezada said, “but that doesn’t mean that we should do everything everybody thinks we should.”

Others were open about the challenges presented by a project involving Gopman.

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“I’m just going to be really real with you,” said Kara Zordel, who heads a respected local organization called Project Homeless Connect and has discussed the project with Gopman. “I hesitate to get involved any further. Our political capital has to be spent so wisely when trying to serve the homeless, and I’m concerned about getting involved in anything controversial.”

Yet while Zordel acknowledged that Gopman’s Facebook post demonstrated “asinineness”, she said: “Sometimes the search for redemption is where you find solutions” and that the state of homelessness in San Francisco justified pushing the envelope.

“If we look at this as an emergency, which it is for people who are sleeping every night in the rain, that makes some of these imperfect solutions a little more perfect.”

Stressing she didn’t know the details, Jennifer Friedenbach, head of a not-for-profit organization, also thinks the concept is worthy of consideration. “It could be dignified housing,” she said.

Paul Boden, of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, takes a harder line and considers the ship idea a distraction from building the “housing we need to end homelessness, because I don’t think a boat is going to end it”. He dismissed Gopman as “someone that put out a blog thing and has been making a career out of it ever since”.

Gopman is aware there is a long road ahead of him. “It’s a radical idea,” he said. “This is not trivial by any means.”