A new program is coming to Snohomish County that for the first time will create a single waiting list for homeless people trying to get into shelters.

The hope is that when the program kicks off this summer, it will end the current hit-or-miss system for finding emergency housing.

Homeless men, women and families will be able to make one call to the countywide social service hotline, known as North Sound 211, to get on the waiting list.

“This project won’t solve homelessness,” said Karen Matson, director of social services for Housing Hope. “It will do a better job of connecting people with housing and related services they desperately need to survive.”

Now, individuals and families have to call multiple agencies almost every day to find emergency housing. Each agency has its own waiting list.

Matson said this amounts to a kind of lottery system: “Are you lucky enough to call the right agency on the right day?”

The new program will produce a one-step computerized waiting list. It is being paid for by the EverTrust Foundation, which pledged grants of $95,000 for the next two years.

The new system brings together 10 local organizations that provide emergency shelter and stopgap housing until the homeless can find more permanent housing.

The groups include Housing Hope, YWCA, Volunteers of America and the Everett Gospel Mission.

About 300 people are now housed daily in area shelters, said Melanie Gillespie, who supervises Snohomish County’s office of housing, homelessness and community development.

In addition, motel vouchers provide housing for roughly 175 families a year for up to 30 days.

There’s room for another 900 people in transitional housing, or places where people can live after they leave shelters until they can find more permanent housing, she said.

Yet demand is so great that at just one organization that helps the homeless, Housing Hope, the waiting list has 500 names, Matson said.

By calling the 211 hotline for services, people will only be asked once to tell their story, instead of repeating it as part of the application process for each individual social service agency, said Bill Humphreys, a Volunteers of America vice president.

Two North Sound 211 employees will work full time answering these calls. They’ll also try to link people with other services they need, such as baby diapers and gasoline money, as they wait for emergency shelter.

“What we forget when we’re not homeless is how difficult it is to meet basic needs” such as getting and preparing food when you don’t have a stove or refrigerator, Matson said.

In addition, 400 more free voice-mail boxes, where messages can be left for people without phones about housing and other basic needs, will be added, Humphreys said.

The Community Voice Mail program, which began in 2001, currently can help up to 700 people. Callers can access their messages from any phone.

By establishing a computerized waiting list for shelters, the county will be able to get a much more accurate count of how many people are homeless.

Now, there are only rough estimates. One measuring stick is the number of adults and children turned away from shelters each year due to lack of space.

The numbers have dramatically increased over the past 24 months, Gillespie said, from 24,322 in 2005 to an estimated 27,324 in 2006.

No one knows, however, how many of these people are counted multiple times as they’re turned away from more than one shelter.

Another measure of homelessness is an annual one-day census, with volunteers fanning out across the county. In 2006, 2,626 people identified themselves as homeless.

And since the North Sound 211 program kicked off last February, the number of people who have asked for help finding emergency shelter has been tracked.

The calls hit a one-month peak in November, when 349 people asked for help. By year’s end, 2,923 people had requested help finding emergency shelter, said Bill Brackin, program director for North Sound 211.

“Emergency shelter calls are in an especially worrisome trend,” he said, noting that in 2005, 1,545 called an earlier version of the 211 line asking for help with emergency shelter.

The new program for wait-listing and helping the homeless is “a service that this community has never had but has desperately needed,” Matson said.

“It’s a far more humane response than endlessly going into people’s voice mail and nobody ever hearing a human voice.”

Reporter Sharon Salyer: 425-339-3486 or salyer@heraldnet.com.