Talking Headways Podcast: How Can Transit Agencies Help Homeless Residents?

This week, we’re joined by Cortni Desir, the executive program manager for public transportation at the Connecticut Department of Transportation. We discuss Desir’s international career, bus infrastructure, rider experience, homelessness and transit, and the importance of curiosity in public service. We recorded this episode at the annual Mpact Transit + Community conference in Portland, Oregon.

As longtime listeners know, Talking Headways offers three methods of consumption. The first option is audio — you can used the embedded player below or subscribe to the podcast in your favorite podcasting app:

The second option is a full transcript generated by AI — so watch out for those typos.

And the third is the edited excerpt below:

Jeff Wood: [Homelessness and public transit] is a very contentious, fraught topic and very sensitive to discuss.

Cortni Desir: Absolutely. It’s complex. Nobody has a perfect solution for it. It’s not something that one agency can do alone. Transit agencies at their core are about moving people, not about housing people, but we have to be part of the solution. Part of the reason that this falls to transit agencies in some places is that when individuals have nowhere else to go, they seek shelter in transit infrastructure, whether it’s a station or a bus stop.

They need a place that they feel is safe and protected from the elements, and sometimes figuring out how to navigate that situation comes into conflict with how an agency wants to create a certain customer experience. And so you’re trying to balance providing support to folks who really need it, and also creating a certain environment that customers might expect. So that can be a really challenging line to figure out.

Jeff Wood: I think it’s hard for folks to understand sometimes the downstream effects of homelessness in the sense that, when homeless folks don’t have a place to live, they seek shelter in public spaces. I find that a lot of folks, when they have these discussions, they don’t quite understand that all these social services are connected and the bus is just the last place and the end of the downstream effect. And so that’s where it shows up, but that’s not necessarily the place where the impacts are happening. And so as an agency, it seems like you can only control so much because there’s only so much that a transit agency can do, but the transit agencies are the ones that see the impacts of something further upstream.

Cortni Desir: Absolutely. And in terms of what we can do, our approach is outreach-first. So we have a small team within Connecticut DOT, we essentially have one person for an entire state, whose role is to build relationships with the social service providers. They build the relationships with law enforcement.

Part of the complexity of this is that while Connecticut’s a small state, we have 169 municipalities. Our public transit services reach more than a hundred of those municipalities. So you have all these different jurisdictions to engage and to create partnerships with. And so we have a safety and security team, and on that team, there’s one person whose main responsibility is to build relationships and create a program with, quite frankly, not a whole lot of resources.