Is homelessness a crime? The question was answered forthrightly in the negative last month by a federal appeals court ruling that struck down a Los Angeles ban on citizens’ living out of their automobiles as a desperate necessity in hard times. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit pronounced the ban — an important part of the city’s anti-homelessness campaign — to be a “broad and cryptic” law that “criminalizes innocent behavior.”

The ruling was an emphatic signal that the nation’s burgeoning problem of homelessness cannot be dealt with by simplistic attempts to criminalize behavior driven by the need to survive. Don’t count on the decision becoming the instant law of the land, however; a new study has exposed a rush by more and more cities to resort to punitive, unreasonable new laws to force the homeless out of sight and out of mind.

The number of places like Los Angeles that banned car sleeping, for example, has increased from 37 in 2011 to 81 this year, according to the study by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. People who find themselves forced to camp out in public parks and places now face bans in 64 communities, up from 40. The number of communities banning sitting or lying in public spaces jumped from 70 to 100 in three years.

What local governments are facing — or rather not facing — is the continuing effects of a recession that has driven desperate people from their homes and jobs in ways that have become all too public in the eyes of politicians and their constituents.