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You are not giving the homeless enough credit for their willingness to set up camp on sidewalks, door-steps, and gutters even where that blocks the public right-of-way.
Nor are you giving the dysfunction of U.S. legal and governmental structures enough credit: in the western united states enforcement of anti-public-camping ordinances is illegal unless the city can demonstrate that it has an empty homeless-shelter bed for every single homeless person in the area.
Wow. That is a crazy ruling. That's basically holding that society must provide some form of shelter to everyone, either directly or via land-grants at the location of their choice, and it must be situated within city limits. I thought declarations like that were usually constitutional amendments or acts of congress, not court decisions.
As a heartless pragmatist, I would like to point out that the local prison is shelter, and usually has plenty of capacity. There is also a ton of room for innovation in public shelters/public housing: public office space is not used at night which could double as shelters, public parking space could be requisitioned for the contruction of shipping container capsule hotels, and cheap homes could be bought up and partitioned.
In principle the decision isn't completely nonsense. You can't make it impossible for someone to not commit a crime. So if someone doesn't have a home, you can't arrest them for being homeless, since they have no choice but to be homeless.
However, they actually do have a choice--leave the city--especially since many of them were drawn to the city in the first place by homelessness policies. There should also be (but probably isn't) the possibility of arresting them for bad behavior; if there are public restrooms, you should be able to arrest them for urinating on the sidewalk instead of public restrooms, blocking places, aggressively begging, etc. since they do have a choice not to do those things.
There's also the problem that many homeless will refuse to use shelters. If I had to make a more sensible version of this ruling, I'd demand that 1) the city is only required to have a number of beds equal to the number of homeless willing to use them, not the total number of homeless, and 2) if a homeless person refuses to use a bed, or is sent to a bed and later caught outside sleeping on a street, they can be jailed.
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