Dozens of gabled prefab homes from Champion Home Builders have been shipped to Eden Village in Springfield, Mo ., as havens for homeless people with chronic disabilities . The columned front porches and exteriors are painted in beiges, mint greens and brick reds, among other hues, and solar panels are being installed on the roofs. A donor has stitched new patchwork quilts for the residents’ beds. “We decided not to give them hand-me-downs, which they’ve had all their lives,” said David Brown , a founder of the project and its umbrella organization, the Gathering Tree.

Glossy stone columbaria have niches that residents can reserve for storing their cremated ashes someday, in hand-turned wooden urns. “This is a place of permanence” for people who have long felt unrooted and not expected anyone to commemorate their lives, said Nate Schlueter , the Gathering Tree’s chief operating officer.

Individualized and well-crafted small homes for the 99 percent have been around since at least the 19th century, when Henry David Thoreau described his ideal quarters as an “airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a traveling god.”

Other proselytizers have included Gustav Stickley , who popularized oaky bungalows; Frank Lloyd Wright , who came up with relatively modest streamlined prefab homes; and Buckminster Fuller , who envisioned utopias studded with geodesic domes.