The US supreme court decided on Monday that it will not hear an appeal of a ruling that allows homeless people to sleep in public outdoor spaces, dashing the hopes of some west coast cities and municipalities grappling with a homelessness crisis that it would be overturned.

Several cities, counties, law enforcement groups and business associations had asked the supreme court to revise last year’s ruling in Martin v City of Boise, in which the ninth circuit court of appeals held that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment to enforce criminal laws against homeless people living on the street if a city did not offer enough shelters. It struck down a Boise, Idaho, city ordinance that made it a misdemeanor to camp or sleep on sidewalks or parks without permission – a common quality-of-life ordinance found in most jurisdictions with a sizable homeless population.

The justices on Monday did not comment on the decision.

Advocates for the homeless had lauded the ninth circuit’s decision as humane common sense.

“On a daily basis, we encounter people who are experiencing homelessness in southern California and are being punished by law enforcement for no other reason than they can’t afford a place to live,” said Julia Devanthéry, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. “Criminalizing people for conduct that they cannot help is not a deterrent to that conduct. People will continue that conduct because it cannot be helped.”

Officials argued that they needed to be able to enforce these ordinances and prevent homeless people from sleeping on sidewalks because encampments block walkways and create public health and safety concerns. The decision “takes away an important tool cities have to stop the proliferation of permanent encampments, which undermine cities’ efforts to provide shelter and services to the most vulnerable”, said Theane Evangelis, an attorney for the city of Boise.

“It removes a crucial tool from local governments’ tool belts, making the connection between shelter-resistant homeless and critical services nearly impossible,” the International Downtown Association and various other Los Angeles-based property owner associations wrote in an amicus brief. “As our homeless stay on the streets longer, they are irreparably psychologically and physically affected; crime increases, diseases spread, homelessness becomes entrenched, acts of violence become commonplace, and rampant drug use further compounds the challenges facing the homeless, making it nearly impossible for people to move out of homelessness and gain economic stability. And as we as citizens are forced to sit by and watch it happen, our humanity slips away.”

With the homeless population growing throughout the west coast – by 16% in a year in Los Angeles and 17% over two years in San Francisco – the problem is that the homeless have nowhere else to go. San Francisco has a shelter-bed waitlist of between 880 and more than 1,100 at any time. In a 2014 study by the Coalition on Homelessness, only 9% of respondents in San Francisco said they could move indoors the last time police told them they had to move – and when they could go indoors, it was to short-term spaces, such as libraries or buses.

Martin v City of Boise has not entirely removed local jurisdictions’ ability to break up encampments either, homeless advocates said. Homeless people are still getting hassled for having “camping paraphernalia, or taking up too much space on a sidewalk, or trespassing, or because they’re closing a park at night”, said Paul Boden, who heads the Western Regional Advocacy Project.

“Cities and municipalities have lots of law enforcement tools at their disposal, whether or not the Martin decision is upheld,” Devanthéry said. “They have all sorts of quality of life ordinances and laws that allows them to control the movement of people without homes in a way that they can’t control those of us who are lucky enough to have homes to live in.”