More than 200 asylum seekers in Toronto, many of them forced to sleep on the streets, will now have access to shelter.

Late Tuesday afternoon, the city issued a news release saying it had secured rooms at two hotels and a city emergency shelter for 212 people.

At her first official council meeting last week, Mayor Olivia Chow secured unanimous approval on a motion to designate the spaces after officials revealed that the number of asylum seekers in Toronto’s shelter system grew by 500 per cent in 20 months.

The spaces would in part come from the $97 million in federal funding recently earmarked for Toronto to help its overstretched shelter system cope with the high numbers of refugee claimants who are unhoused.