A steady rain beat down outside, but in the small, cluttered stand-alone structure that serves as the administrative office for Dignity Village — a 14-year-old tent city turned semipermanent experimental housing community on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon — Mitch Grubic was snug and dry, albeit a bit chilly.

Mitch Grubic

Photograph by Leah Nash for BuzzFeed

He fingered an unlit cigarette he'd just pawned from his girlfriend, Debbie, with whom he shares one of 43 roughly 10-by-12-foot "tiny homes" at Dignity. Grubic, a handsome, ruddy-faced 51-year-old, was recounting how he went from being a California carpenter doing high-end residential work to living in his Ford Bronco with his two dogs and $1,400 to his name, desperately seeking pickup work along the Oregon coast.

Turns out, how Grubic got from that particular A to B wasn't too different from how many of his Dignity neighbors got there: After Grubic's dad died in 2007, Grubic remodeled his dad's Northern California house and sold it, buying his own place nearby. But then the 2008 recession hit, his work dried up, and he had to let go of his new house. He built himself a low-cost hunting lodge but ran afoul of local authorities regarding permits. So he sold most of his tools and drove north, into Oregon.

"I went begging for work," he recalled. Finally, in Seaside, he found it — as a glazier, making $12 an hour. He'd park his truck in Fort Stevens State Park, showering there and sleeping in yurts. But come fall, his work vanished, and the area had scant services for homeless people, so he drove to Portland. "I was parking and sleeping on the city streets," he said, hitting the employment office or the library during the day to look for work.

Eventually, by 2010, he found an isolated, mostly industrial part of town out near the airport to park and sleep at night. Little did he know that he was not far from Dignity Village, where homeless people and their supporters had started building cottages three years before.

"I asked a food bank in Portland if I could park my truck there," recalled Grubic. "They said no, but to go check out Dignity Village." Lo and behold, he said, he realized he'd been sleeping nearby for months. (It's funny he never once glimpsed the village's cluster of cottages, fenced into the city’s former leaf composting yard.) So Grubic got on Dignity's waiting list and started putting in volunteer hours there toward his residence.

Dignity Village

Photograph by Leah Nash for BuzzFeed

"People were mean at first," said Grubic, who has a gruff but warm demeanor. "They said, 'You're not village material.'" But he stuck it out, going to pick up donated pizza for the other villagers, gardening, and using his expertise to trim out unfinished windows. "I started to see the eclectic beauty of it all."

He also started to see, as he put it, "the vision that Dignity stood for — of a place with open arms where people could get clean [from drugs or alcohol], get a change of socks, get warm in winter, get water." He added, "I needed water."

That was 2011. In 2013, Grubic served as Dignity's CEO for a year, and, last year, he was vice chair. Now he’s the security coordinator. He's overseen work parties to get most of the cottages insulated and Sheetrocked, via various grants. And he's grateful. "This place helped me create a home base to go out and find work again," he said.

Currently, he does construction five days a week, making $100 a day and, per Dignity rules, putting $25 a month toward the village's operating expenses. He and Debbie are on a list to get into permanent affordable housing, as everyone at Dignity must be.

Mitch and Debbie with their dogs.

Photograph by Leah Nash for BuzzFeed

But he didn't think he'd put the Dignity experience entirely behind him. "I'd like to become an advocate for the tiny-house village movement," he said, showing off the little structure — complete with front porch — where he and Debbie live with his two dogs: Juneau, a corgi, and Zooey, a Baja terrier. He says that life at Dignity is far from ideal, but he's still proud of what it represents. For other cities looking for examples of this approach as a way to alleviate homelessness, "We've become the go-to place," he said.

And not only that. Dignity and other such villages raise compelling questions that may direct the future of this nascent movement: Should these communities be low-budget affairs largely built through philanthropy and run by residents, as is Dignity, or are they better off as professional, high-budget projects overseen by an outside corporation or nonprofit? Or, as Grubic put it, “Is this a place for the homeless to govern themselves or a business venture?"

Visiting three villages in the rainy Pacific Northwest last fall, I saw how each offered a different pathway, representing our deepest attitudes about the homeless, property, and how we think people should live.

Opportunity Village

Photograph by Leah Nash for BuzzFeed

Grubic is right that Dignity has set a precedent. There were few examples of sanctioned homeless villages before Dignity — Dome Village, a cluster of geodesic domes, existed in Downtown L.A. from 1993 to 2006. But since Dignity transformed in the mid-2000s, with city and community support, from a tent community to one with wooden structures heated with small propane tanks, the idea of a village for homeless people made up of a cluster of "tiny homes" with larger structures for shared baths, kitchen, and lounging has taken hold. (Dignity even has the odd distinction of seemingly having been replicated in the video game Grand Theft Auto V .)

A dome structure in downtown Los Angeles.

Oscar Hidalgo / AP Photo

There's Village of Hope in Fresno, California (established 2004); River Haven in Ventura, California (2004); Opportunity Village in Eugene, Oregon, and Quixote Village in Olympia, Washington (both 2013). In the works or early phases are OM Village in Madison, Wisconsin; Second Wind Cottages in upstate New York; Community First in Austin, Texas; and Emerald Village in Eugene.

These villages tend to be a hybrid of two trends. One is the tent city, a kind of homeless encampment that goes back at least as far as the Depression and that received revived attention from the media once the recession hit, then again in 2011 when several emerged amid the Occupy Wall Street movement. Tent cities crop up in unused city lots, under bridges, in forests, or by riverbanks; usually go unsanctioned by urban governments; and may or may not have some kind of self-governance. (A massive one, in fact, was just shut down in San Jose, where the tech boom has pushed the average monthly rent up to nearly $3,000 — and has pushed many into homelessness.) They usually do not have plumbing, electrical wiring, or heating.

The other trend is the tiny-home movement, which has become increasingly chic in recent years as Americans look for ways to reduce their carbon footprint and to live more economically. The movement has been popularized by such websites as The Tiny House Blog , books including Lloyd Kahn's Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter and Jay Shafer's The Small House Book , and a documentary, all of which feature adorable, dollhouse-like homes of about 500 square feet or less that people have built and live in for dramatically lower costs than the average new American home.

Tiny-home villages for the homeless have retained the idea of everyone having their own tiny structure to sleep and find privacy in, but have, for the most part, consolidated bathroom, kitchen, and recreational space into one or two communal buildings with some combination of plumbing, electricity, and heat. In many ways, they are a multi-roof version of the old-fashioned urban SRO (single-room occupancy) hotel or boarding house, with separate bedrooms but shared baths and kitchen, that provided the working and nonworking poor with affordable living options in so many cities before gentrification turned those properties into boutique hotels or market-rate apartments.

Andrew Heben

Photograph by Leah Nash for BuzzFeed

"We've lost the SRO and only build to middle-class standards now," said Andrew Heben, a young urban planner in Eugene who played a role in the building of Opportunity Village and writes a blog on the topic called Tent City Urbanism and has a new book out by the same name. Heben is a sandy-haired, mild-mannered 27-year-old Ohio native who did his senior thesis at the University of Cincinnati on the upside of homeless tent cities — for example, they foster organic systems of self-governance and mutual aid. He travels frequently to make presentations in small and midsize Western cities that are interested in creating tiny-home villages for their own homeless populations.

Heben called today's tiny-home villages "an early example of something that's coming," as both environmental concerns and income inequality put pressure on low- and middle-income Americans to find ways to live more cheaply. "People see that a lot of us will be living like this in the future."

In this regard, they may be solutions that not only alleviate homelessness, but also prevent it by creating more affordable housing. They provide an option below the lowest rungs of market rent, which in cities such as Portland and Eugene can start around $700. In the gap between such rents and low-income units (such as those subsidized by the federal Section 8 program), for which there are often long waits, homeless people often have no options except for shelters — which afford no privacy and, more vexingly, usually kick people out between early morning and late afternoon — or the streets.

To that end, Heben is helping to develop Eugene's Emerald Village, a larger model where more sophisticated cottages will cost between $10,000 and $15,000 apiece to build and residents will have to put in up to $200 monthly but will also accrue equity in their cottages. At Opportunity, teams spent about four hours building each cottage. “It’s just putting jigsaw puzzle pieces together,” Heben said. An Emerald cottage’s shell alone will take about a day, with further construction needed to finish it out, and each one will be pre-insulated and hooked up with water and electricity.

A simple structure at Opportunity Village.

Photograph by Leah Nash for BuzzFeed

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.

Quixote Village

Photograph by Leah Nash for BuzzFeed

It's hard not to be charmed by Quixote Village in Olympia, Washington, or the story behind it. In 2007, when police broke up a homeless camp in a parking lot in funky downtown Olympia — the state's capital, famous for being, among other things, the onetime home of Kurt Cobain — faith leaders in this progressive college town banded together to allow the residents to camp out in various church parking lots for three to six months at a time.

Eventually, the leaders formed a nonprofit custody group for the residents called Panza, which, over time, successfully lobbied the city, county, and state governments to not only lease to the residents (at $1 yearly for 41 years) a 2.2-acre plot of land in an industrial zone about a 10-minute drive from downtown, but to pony up more than $2.3 million to build a professionally designed village with thirty 144-square-foot cottages and a community building with a “shared kitchen, dining area, living room, showers, laundry, and office and meeting space.”

Jill Severn

Photograph by Leah Nash for BuzzFeed