They may sound prefab, but tiny-home villages, governed and operated at least in part by the villagers themselves, offer a modicum of safety, stability, warmth, cleanliness, autonomy, and privacy. The feds “have very high standards for [traditional] affordable housing and it’s quite expensive,” said Kitty Piercy, Eugene’s mayor, “so Opportunity and Emerald are ways for us to be able to help some people at a much-reduced cost.”

Add to that reduced fear and stress on the part of residents. "I don't wanna live here forever," I was told on a visit to Opportunity Village by a wiry, sweet-natured, 42-year-old recovering alcoholic who goes by the name Johnny Awesome. He was building a small greenhouse onto the front of his cheerful blue cottage, festooned with colored flags and a small disco ball. "This isn't the top rung of society," he said. "And the weather dictates a typical day here too much." Sunny days found residents outside, gardening and building; rainy and cold ones found them holed up in their cottages or congregating in the 30-foot-diameter communal yurt containing computers with Wi-Fi, a large-screen TV, and a pantry.

"But it's safe here," he said. It was a far cry better than a few years ago, when he was living in his car. Having a home base, he told me, was allowing him to pursue his career goal of becoming a trauma counselor.

But of course, the tiny-home village can't flourish everywhere, especially large, densely populated cities with astronomical land values. So far, they seem to be occurring in and around mid- and small-size Western cities whose cultures have some mix of permissive, progressive politics and a certain pioneer DIY spirit. That could also describe Silicon Valley, at least as it sees itself; the irony is that the pioneering spirit of one world (tech) is, in the American West, creating the very kind of extreme income inequality and gouged realty markets that contribute to homelessness. Perhaps no wonder, then, that tiny homes for homeless people are among the housing options that local officials began exploring last year; Leslye Corsiglia, San Jose’s recently departed housing director, said the city’s new mayor likes the idea, “so I think there will be some movement [on such a project] in the not-too-distant future.”

However, Ray Bramson, San Jose's homelessness response manager, said in an e-mail that "while the tiny homes model does offer some benefit in terms of initially low capital/construction costs, the overall high cost of land combined with the lack of available space and the numerous regulatory barriers makes the approach difficult to advance in San Jose." Bramson said the city would likely go with a temporary trailer-home model, but at the moment no such funding exists for the project.

"These villages might fill a small niche but I don't see them as a major solution to the problem of homelessness," said Alex Schwartz, a professor of urban policy at the New School in New York, a city that is trying to solve its own considerable homelessness problem both by reinstating rental subsidies to poor families that were cut back in the era of former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, and by aiming to build 200,000 new units of affordable housing. Previously, Bloomberg also announced plans to build apartments in the form of “microunits” ranging from 250 to 375 square feet, which are slated to open this summer.

"Not to say [such villages] are absolutely impossible" in a city like New York, said Schwartz, "but commercially zoned land is at a premium. Multi-unit solutions [under one roof] make a lot more sense."

Mary Cunningham, who studies homelessness and housing at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank The Urban Institute, agreed. Government housing vouchers and more public housing are the way to go, she told me. “But,” she conceded, “there’s just not enough to go around, and funding programs get cut every year. Meanwhile, we have more people every year who are paying too much rent and struggling to hold on to their housing.”

If, amid this climate of scarcity, tent cities crop up out of sheer necessity in more and more cities, it’s not unimaginable that more cities may take their cue from those in the Pacific Northwest, which stopped seeing such encampments as a scourge and started wondering how they might be upgraded to something safer, cleaner, semipermanent — and even pleasant.