The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that cities cannot arrest the homeless for sleeping on the streets if there’s nowhere else to go. Those prosecutions, the court said, violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The ruling raises questions for Central Oregonians.

Bend currently bars camping in its parks and those owned by the Bend Park & Recreation District. And while the city’s police will still be able to move sleeping homeless people off private property, no matter how many shelter beds are available, they may be unable to cite people for sleeping on public property when shelter beds are full. That holds true in all Central Oregon communities.

Yet the number of homeless in the region is far greater than the number of places to shelter them. During the point-in-time shelter count done in January, for example, Deschutes County volunteers found 450 unsheltered men, women and children. There are, at most, 300 beds in four communities to shelter them. The Jefferson County count showed 74 unsheltered, and in Crook County there were 31. Jefferson County has 16 shelter beds; Crook County, another 16.

The ruling does not mean cities or counties can be expected to come up with housing for all who need it. But it does raise questions for city and county officials. Perhaps the most difficult question is, what’s a community’s responsibility to its unsheltered neighbors?

Should it, for example, work with nonprofits to create more emergency beds and some sort of daytime shelter when weather is the coldest? Would providing access to basic sanitation, portable toilets, both improve public spaces and give the homeless a tiny bit of dignity? And so on.

We don’t know the answers, which could vary from community to community. We do know that simply rousting the sleeping homeless in public places is no longer permitted, at least in the Northwest.