With material tents forbidden on the streets of Brussels, homeless people in the Belgian capital are often left without a safe place to sleep. But one entrepreneur seems to have found a way around the rule: origami-style cardboard tents.

The tents can be folded and carried on someone’s back, and are big enough to house two people. The hope is that they can last for a couple of weeks before needing to be replaced, said Xavier Van den Stappen, the entrepreneur behind the ORIG-AMI project.

“Cardboards are light, they keep the heat, and if they don’t get wet, they are pretty resistant,” Mr. Van den Stappen said by telephone on Saturday. With the help of a local charity, he handed out 20 tents at a Brussels train station on Friday.

The Brussels area had more than 2,600 homeless people in early 2017, according to La Strada, which monitors homelessness in city. But most of the shelters there are overcrowded by wintertime, said Olivier Vanden Avont, the president of L’Appel du Coeur, the group that helped distribute the tents, as well as day-to-day essentials: a blanket, underwear, a T-shirt and a toilet kit.