The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that cities can enforce bans on homeless people sleeping on sidewalks and other public outdoor spaces, a decision that will particularly resonate in cities like Los Angeles, where homeless encampments remain a major issue.

While the 6-3 decision didn’t come as a surprise, said California State University, Northridge political science professor Tom Hogen-Esch, the ruling could have a huge impact in Southern California as smaller cities will still have few incentives to provide shelter and services to the unhoused.

“I think what will happen from this decision is that the homeless crisis will become increasingly concentrated in larger cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco because smaller cities have no economic incentive to maintain and staff shelters,” Hogen-Esch said. “While some smaller cities may do so for political reasons, most cities are going to shy away from that responsibility because it’s easy to just push the problem down the road.”

In its decision, the high court found that outdoor sleeping bans don’t violate the Eighth Amendment. The ruling says that local governments can make and enforce laws against people sleeping in public places without being in violation of the US Constitution’s limits on cruel and unusual punishment.

The case started in the small city of Grants Pass, Ore., where three homeless people sued after receiving citations for sleeping and camping outside. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over nine Western states, including California, has held since 2018 that such bans violate the Eighth Amendment in areas where there are not enough city-provided shelter beds.

Homelessness continues to rise in the US, fueled in part by chronic shortages of affordable housing and rising costs. Around 653,000 people did not have homes in 2023, the largest number since tracking began in 2007, according to US government figures.

The ruling, Hogen-Esch said, came at an “inflection point about whether we could have taken a different path in terms of how we confront the homeless crisis.”

“In the 23 years that I’ve been teaching about this topic, the issue has become only more and more critical,” Hogen-Esch said. “If the ruling had gone another way, that would have been a game changer for homeless people and their advocates. What the decision did was basically maintain the historical status quo — cities are allowed to criminalize homelessness.”

In response to the ruling, California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order requiring state agencies to remove homeless encampments in their jurisdictions and urging cities to follow suit. While Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass condemned the decision and said the city would not change its approach to clearing encampments, San Francisco Mayor London Breed said the city will begin an assertive campaign to force people off the streets, highlighting the different approaches that municipalities are undertaking to find solutions.

This leaves some ambiguity in how cities will tackle homelessness, instead of finding a long-term solution, Hogen-Esch said.

“What was really at stake was that there was some sort of solution on the table here and the Supreme Court ruled this is not a cruel and unusual punishment case,” Hogen-Esch said. “This is a problem that local governments need support from states and the national government but basically that decision says that the national government is ‘out,’ and they are not dealing with this issue, which makes this an extremely challenging public policy problem.”