If you have an emergency, you dial 911. If you find yourself in need of emergency food or shelter, you can dial 211 â but help might not come very soon.
On a busy morning at Seattle's Crisis Clinic, specially trained operators such as Alex Williams, handle a flood of 211 calls.
"We do try to stress that, unfortunately, because the need is so great, it isn't likely to be immediate, and it could be months, even, before they are placed in a shelter," Williams says. "It can be frustrating and difficult to deliver that message."
The hotline connects callers to all sorts of services. In the Seattle area, it's also the front door for a program called the Family Housing Connection.
Under that program, homeless families typically wait more than six months before they land a spot in some kind of low-income housing.
Nationwide, the need for shelter dwarfs what governments and charities have been able to provide for the homeless.
That gap is worsened in the Seattle area by the bottleneck of the Family Housing Connection, located in King County.
[For more of this story, written by John Ryan, go to http://www.npr.org/2015/04/08/...nder-seattles-system]
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