Complex questions require complex answers.

It is encouraging that community members in my area are thinking constructively about how to provide therapeutic care to mentally ill and drug addicted citizens enduring homelessness in the midst of plenty.

Two oversimplifications, however, regularly leap off the pages of my local daily newspaper. One is that one enormous warehouse containing every low-functioning person in Canada has any hope of improving the lives of the people swallowed into it. The other is that unless "we" are able to impose involuntary confinement on "them," all is lost.

As in every other facet of social life, seeing problems and solutions from "our" perspective only and ignoring "theirs" – negotiating with ourselves, as it were, always with an eye toward minimizing cost to the top of the net-worth pyramid – is guaranteed not to satisfy the needs of subjects decided to be swept out of sight and mind because "our" needs not "theirs" are the subject of conversation.

Tiny villages with embedded mental health and drug treatment supports have the best chance of turning homeless mentally ill and addicted individuals' lives around because these are the environments that homeless people say they would welcome any time they are asked.

Tiny villages share crucial social characteristics with homeless encampments, which themselves are an organic expression of homeless individuals' need for stability, security, community, and the opposite of anonymity; to be a person, in other words, in the company of other people.

Leaving aside what it costs to train and employ healthcare professionals to provide services to these demographics, tiny villages require plots of land, and land costs a king's ransom in the financialized economy that defines the parameters of our lives. Hence, endless suggestions of involuntary confinement of as many bodies as possible in enormous, impersonal warehouses when the most fundamental need of someone thrown out on the street to vanish is to be acknowledged and administered care as a unique individual person.