With winter about two months away, Lexington is taking steps to keep roofs over the heads of its homeless.

Starting November 1st, the city is leasing nearly 100 hotel rooms for the unhoused community.

Kentucky Edition caught up with city officials for a closer look at this plan to protect one of Lexington's most vulnerable populations.

We have shelter beds in the 506 hundred range where we have hundreds of people in shelters.

Obviously, we don't have enough where we wouldn't have people who are staying on the streets.

All of the shelters that are currently operating that the city pays for are full.

So it can be a challenge to get into those shelters, especially for certain populations, which would be women, women with children.

For families that want to stay together, you know, there's there's a lot of options for like a single man at the Hope Center.

But once you get into other populations, that can be it can be difficult.

But many of the people who can't go to a shelter, those are the ones we try to focus on in the winter.

And so what we're going to do in the coming season, starting November 1st, is we have master leased about 95 hotel rooms and we are going to place people who otherwise couldn't go to a shelter like the Hope Center.

That's how we start, Ami.

They're going to get a hotel room for the winter.

They'll be able to stay there for as long as they need to.

So, you know, we would like to hope that before the winter is over, we were able to work with them and help get them into something more permanent.

And that'll be the goal.

But just to make sure they're safe and they have somewhere to go on the cold nights and they're not having to go in and out, in and out every time the weather changes.

Our goal is to get as many people as possible into those hotels this winter.

We are using a Super eight and a Motel six, both of which are off of Winchester Road near I-75.

But this isn't something where you can just walk up to us and get a hotel room.

There's a vetting process.

Folks will go through our street outreach teams.

They will identify the people who they believe are eligible, people who, you know, they're going to work first and see if they can get into one of our existing shelters.

That's part of the reason they will have to go through them.

It won't just be anybody who walks in town can get a hotel room because there's a limited number.

So we're also going to prioritize based on illnesses and age and mobility and those kinds of things, to make sure that the most vulnerable people get the first chance at the roof.

You just have to be homeless with nowhere else to go and then not be able to go to any of our traditional shelters.

And that could just be because they're full.

But it could also be maybe because you had a restriction from behavior there or you have a mental health issue that prevents you from being in a big congregate setting for a lot of people.

Every case is a little different.

And so we'll just evaluate that case and see which program is the best fit.

In addition to this winter, temporary hotel program, have other programs like we have a small program for families that uses hotel rooms throughout the year.

For people who, like I said, a family that wants to stay together, they don't want to separate.

It gives us some options for them.

It's it's limited in capacity.

We need more.

And so we do use hotels throughout the year, just not always at the scale.

We'll use them for this winter.

The city first used hotel rooms to house the homeless during the COVID pandemic.