Can a retired cruise ship become a neighbourhood? That is the question a Portland, Maine, non-profit director has been asking since 2018. Kenneth (Ken) Capron, who runs an organisation called Memory Works, proposed buying an old cruise ship, mooring it permanently in Portland's harbour and converting its cabins into affordable homes for people who are homeless, low-income workers, immigrants and single parents. The idea has never been built, but it has been studied, debated and refined, and it touches a real problem: Maine, like much of the United States, does not have enough housing people can afford.
Here is what Capron actually proposed, what the numbers look like, why the idea appeals to some people and worries others, and where it stands.
The 2018 proposal in brief
In autumn 2018, Capron told Maine Public that he planned to ask the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for a $250,000 grant to pay for a feasibility study. The study would look at logistics, funding and long-term sustainability: could a ship really work as permanent housing, and who would pay for it? He described Portland as an ideal testing ground, calling it "really the best laboratory I can imagine" because the city had all the pieces needed for the study.
Before applying, he invited the public to a presentation at Portland City Hall in early October 2018. Local TV station WGME reported his reasoning: used cruise ships can reportedly be bought for as little as $5 million, and a typical mid-sized vessel carries around 800 passengers in nearly 400 cabins. Each deck of a ship about 500 feet long and 90 feet wide covers roughly an acre, Capron said, and a well-maintained hull could last for decades.
Guests sleeping on mats on the floor of an emergency shelter, the kind of crowded overnight space that housing advocates in Portland have long tried to move people out of. Images like this from the TV coverage explain why a ready-made building full of private rooms looked attractive.
Ken Capron, described on screen as a Portland entrepreneur, explaining the plan to WMTW News 8. He leads Memory Works, a Maine non-profit, and has championed the cruise-ship concept for years.
Who the ship would house, and how
Capron's pitch was never only about a bed for the night. In interviews he described four groups he hoped to serve: people experiencing homelessness, low-income residents, the local workforce and recently arrived immigrants. All of them, he argued, need both a home and a route to steady work, so the ship would also offer job-skills training on board.
That mix matters. Housing experts often warn against concentrating only the most vulnerable people in one isolated building. A mixed community, with working residents alongside people moving out of shelters, is closer to what many cities now aim for.
A large cruise liner moored at a pier in Portland. Maine's largest city is a busy cruise port in summer and autumn, which is partly why local people could picture a ship as a permanent part of the waterfront.
A small coastal cruise ship off the New England shore. Vessels of this size carry a few hundred passengers, and their cabins are compact, which is one reason any conversion would need careful design to make rooms livable year-round.
What would it cost?
Early online versions of this story threw around big numbers: ships costing anywhere from $5 million to $100 million and more than a thousand residents on board. Those figures were not well sourced. The more careful reporting at the time gave only the lower purchase estimate, around $5 million for a used vessel, and the passenger capacity of a typical ship. Buying the hull is also the cheapest part. Converting cabins into homes, bringing the vessel up to housing codes, installing permanent utility connections, insuring it and maintaining a steel ship in salt water every year would all add substantial costs that had not been calculated in 2018.
Capron's later writing suggests the plan grew much larger. In a commentary for the Maine business journal Mainebiz, he proposed Royal Caribbean's Majesty of the Seas, a ship launched in 1992, and estimated that with many cabins combined into family units it could eventually house about 4,600 people, at rents of roughly $300 to $1,500 a month. He also said he would need tax-exempt revenue bonds for the infrastructure, but he did not publish a total price.
An interview from the regional TV coverage of the idea. Local leaders and service providers asked practical questions about funding, safety and how residents would reach jobs and services from the waterfront.
Onlookers photograph a docked cruise ship. Modern cruise ships are designed as floating hotels, with kitchens, laundries, medical rooms and power plants already on board, which is the core of the argument for reusing one.
The case for and against a floating neighbourhood
Why supporters like it
- Speed. A ship already contains hundreds of private rooms with bathrooms, which could in theory be occupied faster than a new building could be designed and built.
- No land to find. Waterfront moorings avoid some of the fights over building sites that slow housing projects on land.
- Shared facilities. Kitchens, dining rooms, laundries and meeting spaces could support training programmes and community life.
Why critics are cautious
- Running costs. Ships need regular dry-docking, hull work and specialist engineers. Those bills do not go away when a vessel stops sailing.
- Rules and permits. A permanently moored vessel used as homes falls between maritime law and building codes. Fire safety, accessibility for disabled residents and evacuation plans all need answers.
- Small rooms. Standard cabins are designed for a holiday, not for daily life with children, work clothes and belongings.
- Location. Prime harbour berths are valuable, and residents need easy access to transit, schools and health care.
Ships have been used as temporary accommodation elsewhere, for example to house workers, security staff at major events or refugees during emergencies in Europe. Those uses were short-term. Turning a ship into permanent, affordable homes is a different and largely untested proposition, which is exactly why a feasibility study was the first step.
Another view of the cruise ship moored in Portland harbour on an overcast day. Capron's later plan identified a deep-water site between the Maine State Pier and the Ocean Gateway terminal, an area where development had stalled because the city and the state both claimed ownership of the submerged land.
The bow of Oceania Cruises' Insignia, a mid-sized ship of the kind often sold on after a few decades of service. Older ships regularly leave major fleets, which is why proponents argue there is a supply of hulls that could be repurposed instead of scrapped.
What happened next
The grant application and city hall presentation did not lead to a ship arriving in 2018 or 2019. Viral posts at the time claimed Portland's mayor was open to the idea; Capron himself later wrote that his 2018 proposal to the mayor was rejected. Some versions of the story also gave the project the name "Hope Harbor", a title we could not confirm in contemporary local reporting.
Capron kept pushing. In his Mainebiz commentary he wrote that a 78-page study by three US Navy lieutenants at MIT's naval engineering programme had concluded in early 2023 that converting a retired cruise ship into housing was feasible. He framed the ship as one piece of a much bigger housing shortage, citing a MaineHousing estimate that the state needs tens of thousands of additional homes. Feasibility on paper is not the same as approval, financing and a mooring, and as of the latest available reporting no ship had been converted in Portland.
Rows of cabin balconies on a modern cruise ship. Each of these rooms has its own bathroom, which is the feature that makes ships look like ready-made apartment blocks, though most cabins are far smaller than a typical studio flat.
The video above sums up the original plan as it circulated in 2018.
Why the idea still gets attention
The cruise-ship plan keeps resurfacing because it dramatises a simple point: building new homes is slow and expensive, while existing structures sit idle. Similar thinking lies behind converting empty offices, hotels and motels into housing, an approach many US cities have tried with more success because those buildings already sit on land, connected to streets and services.
If you are following housing debates in your own area, the Portland story offers a useful checklist for any unusual proposal: who will live there, who pays to run it over twenty or thirty years, which rules apply, and how residents will get to work, school and medical care. Ideas that answer those questions well are worth taking seriously, whether they float or not.
Sources: Maine Public: Mainer proposes to convert cruise ship into homeless shelter (October 2018); WGME: Organization hopes to use old cruise ships to house homeless (30 September 2018); Mainebiz commentary by Kenneth A. Capron. Images: stills from TV news coverage (WMTW, WBIR and others).
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