A former San Francisco mayor wants to put the city's homeless on a Navy ship (xpost from CA group)

[KamaAina]

http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Meet-the-guy-in-charge-of-tackling-San-8331836.php

A former San Francisco mayor is rocking the boat with a new proposed solution to the city's homeless crisis. Art Agnos, who led the city from 1988 to 1992, wants to create a temporary shelter aboard a retired Navy ship.

In an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle on Tuesday, Agnos suggested turning the USS Peleliu, a decommissioned assault ship that rests in a San Diego harbor, into a shelter capable of housing "most, if not all, of San Francisco's homeless living in tents on the streets."...

The USS Peleliu has sleeping quarters, kitchens, medical clinics, offices, and recreation facilities, and once carried 5,000 military personnel on the open seas, according to Agnos. He proposes docking the ship at the Port of San Francisco, just steps from the city's tourist-packed Ferry Building, where the homeless populations can board at night.

His idea might not be as crazy as it sounds. After a 1989 earthquake leveled the Marina district and caused about $5 million in damages, people left homeless by the disaster sought shelter in the Moscone Convention Center. When the venue needed to reopen for business, a Navy admiral offered the USS Peleliu as a temporary dwelling.

I doubt that docking it right next to the Ferry Building is going to fly, but the Port of SF stretches for miles along the city's eastern waterfront, and most of it is only a few blocks from a Muni Metro streetcar line. And there's always Treasure Island, which was once a Navy facility.

[ChazInAz]

1. Familiar idea.

Harry Harrison used it in his distopian novel "Make Room! Make Room!", later filmed as "Soylent Green".

[KamaAina]

2. I just remembered that there is an obscure federal law

requiring surplus federal property (closed bases, etc.) to be used to house homeless people where possible.

[ghostsinthemachine]

3. Not gonna happen, no how, no way

Once you create a space, put out a trashcan, put up a porto-pottie, you will be responsible for the actions of those who would utilize those services. And that means rules, and in something this expansive, a lot of them. Sobriety. Time. All of the rules that leave most of the homeless outside of the shelters now. Thinking that a few hundred, or even a thousand people, all with mental health, drug and alcohol abuse, law enforcement/probation, pets issues along with a strong sense of independence could possibly live together is ludicrous.

[KamaAina]

4. Sobriety? On a Navy ship?!

[LeftyMom]

5. A lot of homeless people in SF need inpatient care, not a surplus cot.

[XemaSab]

6. A lot of homeless people in SF need a safe place to sleep

Not some ungodly crossover fanfic between Snowpiercer, Lifeboat, and The Road.