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.”

The Stats: Homelessness in the UK Show all 10 1 /10 The Stats: Homelessness in the UK The Stats: Homelessness in the UK Sleeping rough up 165% from 2010 The total number of people counted or estimated to be sleeping rough on a single night in autumn 2018 was 4,677, up 2,909 people or 165% from the 2010 total of 1,768 Getty The Stats: Homelessness in the UK London rough sleepers up 13% The number of people sleeping rough increased by 146 or 13% in London since 2017 AFP/Getty The Stats: Homelessness in the UK London accounted for 27% of people sleeping rough in England London accounted for 27% of the total number of people sleeping rough in England. This is up from 24% of the England total in 2017 Getty The Stats: Homelessness in the UK 64% of rough sleeps UK nationals 64% were UK nationals, compared to 71% in 2017 AFP/Getty The Stats: Homelessness in the UK 14% of rough sleepers are women 14% of the people recorded sleeping rough were women, the same as in 2017 Getty The Stats: Homelessness in the UK 6% were aged 25 years or under, compared to 8% in 2017 AFP/Getty The Stats: Homelessness in the UK Thousands of families staying in temporary housing Almost 79,000 families were staying in temporary housing in the last three months of 2017 because they didn't have a permanent home, compared with 48,010 in the same period eight years before Getty The Stats: Homelessness in the UK Reduction in families living in temporary housing before Coalition government There had been a significant reduction in families living in such conditions before the Coalition government came into power, with the number having fallen by 52 per cent between 2004 and 2010 under the Labour government AFP/Getty The Stats: Homelessness in the UK Families staying in temporary has risen since But the figure has crept up in each of the past seven years, from 69,140 in the last quarter of 2015, to 75,740 in the same period in 2016 and 78,930 at the end of last year Getty The Stats: Homelessness in the UK Nearly 58,000 families accepted as homeless (2018) Nearly 58,000 families have been accepted as homeless by their local council in the past year (as of March 2018), equating to an increase of 8 per cent over the last five years Getty

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.

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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.

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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.