Walking near homeless camps in Bend you can see trash, smell the urine-scented air or you could choose to see people struggling to survive.

Some people are beset by addiction. Some shout at the air. Some have jobs and can’t afford a place to live.

The state, counties and cities have tried to cultivate solutions. They have fallen short. Into that space have stepped the courts, which doesn’t solve the problem.

One key court decision for Grants Pass rippled across the West.

A three judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found in September that some ordinances in Grants Pass that forbid homeless people from sleeping in public areas were unconstitutional. And last week, it was announced judges on the court voted not to rehear the decision, accompanied by passionate declarations of dissent.

“There are stretches of the city where one cannot help but think the government has shirked its most basic responsibilities under the social contract: providing public safety and ensuring that public spaces remain open to all,” Judge Milan Smith, Jr. wrote of Los Angeles. “One-time public spaces like parks — many of which provide scarce outdoor space in dense, working-class neighborhoods — are filled with thousands of tents and makeshift structures, and are no longer welcoming to the broader community.”

Judge Roslyn O. Silver and Judge Ronald M. Gould wrote in their majority opinion that the decision “holds only that governments cannot criminalize the act of sleeping with the use of rudimentary protections, such as bedding, from the elements in some public places when a person has nowhere else to sleep.” It “does not establish an unrestrained right for involuntarily homeless persons to sleep anywhere they choose,” they wrote. “Nor does it require jurisdictions to cede all public spaces to involuntarily homeless persons…. When there is space available in shelters, jurisdictions are free to enforce prohibitions on sleeping anywhere in public.”

The law that flows from that decision includes Oregon. But the case seems likely to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

We know things can be done to help solve homelessness for some people. One unfortunate example: The Oregon Legislature chose to dither rather than pass a bill allowing more affordable housing to be built outside of urban growth boundaries.