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Kentucky Lantern

By Liam Niemeyer

When temperatures plunge to dangerous levels as they have this week, Jessica Lee’s nonprofit in Somerset runs low on space for all the people seeking to come indoors. So she gets on the phone to shelters around the region.

Sometimes she’s helped shuttle people as far as Owensboro or Chattanooga. But that doesn’t work for someone who has a job in Pulaski County or just doesn’t want to go that far from home, she says. Some people choose to camp outside, though it’s now illegal in Kentucky without permission. Others stay in their cars.

“It’s very obvious there is a very large shortage of emergency shelter,” said Lee, who helped found the nonprofit Help the Homeless in 2023 from what started as her effort to provide backpacks to locals experiencing homelessness. “The lack of shelter really comes into play in the winter months here where the temperatures go up and down.”

Across the state, the story is the same. While Kentucky ultimately needs to build more affordable housing to alleviate homelessness, advocates say, shelters with services and support are still crucial.

“Some days it’s tough to watch that we just won’t acknowledge that emergency shelters need to be funded in communities for the role that they play,” said Kim Webb, the executive director of the Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky in Covington.

The way Webb sees it, Kentucky requires each county to have an animal shelter — but has no requirement for a shelter “for human beings.”

“Why don’t you see more emergency shelters? The reality is it takes money,” Webb said.

Trying to find shelter both day and night

With snow, ice and freezing temperatures pummeling the state this month, hundreds of warming centers have opened or remained on standby inside local government buildings, churches, community centers and fire stations.

Some Kentucky cities have “white flag” operations that activate at certain temperature thresholds, often 32 degrees Fahrenheit, when certain buildings are made available to the public for warming and shelter space is expanded.

But in rural counties the warming options may be limited. Graves County in West Kentucky has a volunteer fire department open as a warming center about a 20-minute drive south of the county seat.

Cassy Dasham, the office manager for the nonprofit Camp Graves that provides transitional housing for those displaced by natural disasters and other circumstances, said warming centers that “pop up” to offer places to stay during the day are well intentioned. But Dasham said if warming centers aren’t consistently open, those who need them may not be aware of their availability, let alone have transportation to get there. Warming centers also may not operate overnight or have the resources and trained staff to be an overnight shelter.

“That’s nothing on the people opening these temporary warming centers. It’s just hard to communicate with the homeless community without it being something consistent,” Dasham said.

Instead of temporary warming centers, she said, what’s really needed in her part of rural Kentucky is a “low-barrier” emergency shelter. According to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, such shelters offer immediate, around-the-clock access and focus on getting those in shelter access to permanent housing as soon as possible.

Kentucky as of 2023 would need at least an additional 1,300 shelter beds to meet the estimated need, says the alliance, based on data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The number of people who are considered homeless by the federal government reached a record high in 2024. In Kentucky, HUD estimated the number of unsheltered persons at 1,716 last year, which was an increase from 1,470 persons in 2023. Critics have said federal estimates of the number of homeless people are likely a significant undercount.

Ban on street camping magnifies need for shelter

Further complicating the situation for people experiencing homelessness, Dasham said, is a law passed by state legislators last year that prohibits street camping. Critics of that law have said it criminalizes homelessness, while Republicans who backed the law say it encourages those on the street to seek mental health services and other support.

Dasham questioned how a person could be criminally punished “for being homeless” when there isn’t shelter available “to prevent the crime.”

House Bill 5 allowed, but does not require, a local government to designate an area to allow temporary camping so that people experiencing homelessness aren’t in violation of the law. HB 5 also exempts people sleeping in cars overnight from violating the law. The law is facing a constitutional challenge by a woman who was cited for unlawful camping while she was going into labor.

Lexington’s government implemented its emergency winter weather plan earlier this month, coordinating existing shelter space among multiple organizations including the Catholic Action Center and contracting with a motel to use rooms that increase capacity by approximately 190 beds.

But Jeff Herron, Lexington’s homelessness prevention manager, told the Lantern earlier this month that federal funding for emergency shelters has remained relatively flat, on top of the city receiving no state appropriations for homelessness services. That means the city has had to find funding in its own budget to meet demand for shelter, he said, at a time when a person can potentially break the law by sleeping outdoors.

“That leaves the local government with a lot of responsibility and trying to find additional investments to ensure that the need is met,” Herron said. “You do need to have a safety net for your community. You need to have solutions and safe places that people can go, particularly when there are situations like extreme weather that are a threat to someone’s safety.”

Another advocate helping people experiencing homelessness in Lexington says some people living outside have been “hiding” and hesitant to give out information because of fear of criminal prosecution under House Bill 5, called the Safer Kentucky Act.

“It’s really impacted the ability for folks to get help,” said Ginny Ramsey, the executive director of the Catholic Action Center in Lexington. “They don’t trust calling the government and giving them their Social Security number.”

Ramsey told the Lantern her nonprofit had to rent hotel space earlier this month with its own funding because the shelter space and motel rooms being coordinated by Lexington’s government weren’t enough to house all the people on the streets.

“We can’t sit back and watch people freeze to death,” Ramsey said.

Requests for an interview sent to Rep. Jared Bauman, R-Louisville, the primary sponsor of HB 5, were not immediately returned.

Little funding to go toward costly operations

Federal money the state gets doesn’t go far and is allocated across multiple needs such as street outreach, rapid rehousing and rental assistance.  Annually, Kentucky has received roughly $30 million to $35 million from HUD in recent fiscal years with about half of that going to the Kentucky Housing Corp.

Kenzie Strubank, an assistant director for homelessness programs for the Kentucky Housing Corporation, said the millions of dollars from HUD gets “eaten up really fast.”

“The problem that we have with shelters is we don’t have enough funding to operate them,” Strubank said. “They are incredibly costly to operate if you’re operating them in a professional manner.”

Those costs can include training staff along with the overhead costs of running a building.

She pointed to how other states, particularly West Virginia, have appropriated their own funds to maintain and expand access to shelter operations. But Strubank, along with other advocates, also emphasized shelters are just a temporary solution for people experiencing homelessness.

“It is not the destination, it is your first stop,” Strubank said. “If we don’t increase our housing supply, this problem will be very difficult to solve because the only thing that actually ends homelessness is housing — the end. That’s it.”