Transit and the Unhoused Transcript

Nadine Lee: When it comes to homelessness, there's one underlying question facing many transit agencies. How can we balance its impact on our services while maintaining our social responsibilities to provide transportation to all of our riders, whether they are housed or not?

Most transit agencies in major cities across America are grappling with this question.

You're listening to mobility in motion, a podcast produced from Dallas area, rapid transit. I'm your host, Nadine Lee, President and CEO of DART.  

The fact is, on a single night in the United States, there are over 700, 000 unhoused people. And when the transit system is being used for shelter, that raises concerns that it could deter ridership.

Warranted or not, if people don't feel safe, they might stop taking transit. The good news is, agencies are developing strategies to help address this issue,

here in Dallas, this challenge falls to Charlie Cato. Chief of the Dart Police Department. I recently sat down with Chief Cato to talk about what his department is doing to both help unhoused people who use transit and also make sure the system remains safe for everyone.

He said his first priority is making sure the rights of people experiencing homelessness are protected.

Chief Charlie Cato: It can be unsettling for some folks to see someone who's experiencing homelessness, but the reality is if they have fare and they're following the code of conduct, they're another rider on the system. And that's the challenge is to make sure that everybody's treated with dignity and respect, regardless of what they wear or how they, carry themselves, they're still, they're still human beings and we need to make sure that we treat them fairly.

Chief Charlie Cato: Yeah,

Nadine Lee: One of the things, you know, during my time in Los Angeles, of course, the Los Angeles unhoused population is quite a bit larger than it is here in north Texas. One of the things that I learned to talk about and in integrate into some of the things that I would say when I was speaking publicly about homelessness, um, is that first of all, being homeless is not a crime, Right?

And so I think there are a lot of assumptions that are made about people who are unsheltered on the system that may or may not be true.

Chief Charlie Cato: So yes, what we focus on to your point is the code of conduct. We focus on people who are sleeping, taking up more than one seat, if they have large baggage or, or buggies or something and they're taking up or blocking the aisle, those kind of things.

Creating lit ter on, on the system or, or uncleanliness or also just being disruptive. We have to have the aisles clear, we have to have enough seats for everyone who, who paid for a seat, and so those are the kind of things we focus on just to make sure that they're, that they're complying.

So other than that, the only real difference between some commuter taking the the train to the airport and, and an unhoused person is the type of luggage they use and what they what kind of clothes they wear.

Nadine Lee: Totally fair. So, tell us how your department works with people who are experiencing homelessness on the DART system.

Chief Charlie Cato: One of the things we've done is we've created a team, the multidisciplinary response team, to help address that. Because oftentimes the folks who are acting out who are unhoused are are either experiencing a mental illness or mental health crisis, or they have a substance abuse problem.

And so, if we're going to make an impact for them, we have to address those two things. And so, we've educated our officers all on the resources available to, those who are unhoused if they make an outcry and ask for, ask for shelter.

We've developed relationships with social service providers in our area that we can, um. that we can connect people with and then with the multidisciplinary response team we have a licensed clinical social worker assigned to a police officer paired up with an officer who can go out and make contact and make assessments and make referrals to folks from there.

Nadine Lee: How are those programs working?

Chief Charlie Cato: I think they're, working well. We finished a one-year pilot. We just signed, this week to expand the program to the entire DART service area. And so, it's important that we're going to be able to expand. We've been concentrated in the pilot program in the Central Business District and from Victory also out to Bachman because in our tracking of calls for service and issues related to unhoused population that's where we saw the concentration.

All four of our rail lines currently go through downtown from Pearl to the convention center. So, if we can make an impact in that area, we can impact the entire system. And so that's what we concentrated on. However, we also realized that we have to do a better job of connecting All the service area cities, all 13 cities and DFW airport because we do get calls about unhoused people in each of those cities and stops of our 65 train stations. We, we do get other calls and so we want to be able to service the entire service area.

Nadine Lee: One of   the ways Chief Cato and his department have expanded their reach to work with unhoused people is by partnering with umbrella service agencies such as Housing Forward. Housing Forward coordinates more than 150 homelessness services, government, and nonprofit agencies in the Dallas region.

This organization provides critical resources and support to individuals in need, and it's been working. Dallas and Collin counties have seen a significant reduction in homelessness since 2021. Sarah Khan is the president and CEO of Housing Forward.

Sarah Kahn: The strategies that we've seen really work is leveraging some of the things that DART is already looking like how to leverage the multi. response teams but the idea is we're meeting people where they're at, which means that we now bring with us behavioral healthcare teams, outreach workers, street medicine addiction specialists, peer specialists, we meet people directly where they are on the streets, or in transit. And then through that engagement process. we know that we then have an opportunity to bring shelter or bring people directly permanent housing.

Nadine Lee: Last year, Housing Forward launched a coordinated outreach program with other agencies in Dallas in order to expand their efforts to help those who are experiencing homelessness.

Sarah Kahn: As communities, we've learned that we always do better when we're working under the same umbrella. And so, last year, we brought together, about 35 outreach workers and defined a common program model for what we wanted a best practice outreach team to like. So now, all of those outreach workers are working under the same program model, essentially. And the most important part of that is each team is assigned a specific geographic area, which means that the same outreach workers go to the same geographic area to engage folks consistently so that we can much more effectively build rapport with people, engage folks, kind of get them on pathway back shelter or into permanent housing. 

Nadine Lee: This made me wonder, what kinds of impacts are these programs having on DART's transit system? I asked Chief Cato.

 Are there any specific success stories that you can recall that you'd like to share?

Chief Charlie Cato: Yes, we've had a number of them, one of our biggest ones was a young man who had been on the, uh, he'd been on the streets for 10 years and, uh, he, he'd been contacted twice by our multidisciplinary response team. And he had both times he had refused or declined services and one particular night he approached him and he, he made an outcry and says, “I really, I really need to do something different.”

And it was cold that night. They connected him to one of the service area providers, a church, the Oklahoma United Methodist Church and while en route there they got his name and got his sister's name and found a phone number and called and the sister and her husband drove from Overland Park, Kansas to Dallas overnight so they could see him.

They hadn't seen him in 10 years. They thought he was dead. So we were able to reunite him with his family. They came down here to get him, to see him. And it was a very emotional reunion. We've had 15 other stories just like that.

And we've had a number of people who we've connected to services who were successful in moving to transitional supportive housing, and hopefully to permanent supportive housing at some point and getting on the, you know, getting out on their own.

Nadine Lee: Yeah, that's great. That's a wonderful story, and, and it's nice to know that there are more stories of reuniting people because there's always somebody out there who cares about them.

Are there other transit agencies that you look to for, new ideas on how to address the issues with the homeless population?

Chief Charlie Cato: We actually visited, Philadelphia, the SEPTA in Philadelphia and we visited MARTA and they each have things that we learned from. The MARTA model: they don't have police officers assigned. They have just civilians assigned.

They're not even licensed clinicians. They're just people who want to help. They’re social workers, they're case workers, and they have a knowledge base of the social service agencies that are there. I knew we wanted something more than that. I wanted to make a clinical assessment in the field, so I learned from that.

And then going to SEPTA, the biggest takeaway I had from there, from the team, was that they had, they had a partnership, they had a relationship where they had a dedicated space where they knew they could get someone in at any time. 

Candice Player:  We open the doors to the public at 7 a.m., but there's a long line of people waiting to come in. So, we can see, on average, maybe 50, 60, I've seen that line as long as, up to 100 people waiting to come in in the morning

Nadine Lee: That's Candice Player. She works with the program that Chief Cato mentioned at SEPTA, or the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority. Player is a vice president at Project Home. The transit program she helps to coordinate is called the Hub of Hope.

Candice Player: The Hub of Hope, is a drop-in center where anyone who is homeless or has a history of homelessness or is at risk of homelessness can go into this drop-in center. It's in Suburban Station here in Philadelphia, in part because people were already using suburban station as a natural shelter.

And so, there was a desire to offer people more than sitting on a bench all day—to try to offer people resources and really to meet people where they were.

Nadine Lee: The Hub of Hope provides an array of resources and is set up in an old SEPTA police station no longer in use. Player says it is a prime location because it's right underneath the Municipal Services Building in the center of Philadelphia, aptly named Center City.

Candice Player:  People can come in and get a breakfast. That's the way we start the day. But then, folks can come in and get a shower, laundry, a change of clothes. There are also menders who can come in and repair someone's clothes. But the best part about the Hub of Hope is that its social services are co-located. So, there is a healthcare clinic where on any given day there's a physician, a nurse practitioner, maybe a behavioral health consultant, a psychiatric nurse practitioner. So if someone needed, let's say, a psychiatric evaluation, or verification of disability to secure a longer term placement, instead of asking them to like schlep or trek all over town, they can literally just walk across the room to the clinic and get one of the nurse practitioners to handle that for them.

Nadine Lee: The Hub of Hope also has an occupational therapy program in partnership with a local hospital. It's designed to help people with the daily activities of living, like creating a budget, or writing a resume, or things like stress and anger management.

Player says it is all about building relationships and trust and creating an environment that is welcoming and supportive to everyone.

Candice Player: We don't demand that people enroll in a particular service or commit to a particular activity. It's just come through the front door, check us out, see what we're doing, see if there's something here of interest to you. And then over time, you know, perhaps we'll find a good connection.

Nadine Lee: Player says that the Hub of Hope is a model that other transit agencies can use. It's important to have a good location, along with the staffing and resources. But she says there also needs to be a clear pathway from a daytime drop-in center to housing.

Candice Player: Whether that's emergency shelter or a safe haven, or better yet, long term permanent supportive housing, and so as transit agencies are interested in programs like this, I would encourage them to, to really work in tandem with and partnership with their local offices of homeless services to ensure that there is real coordination.

We don't just want a drop-in center. That's not the goal. The ultimate goal, the end goal is housing.

Nadine Lee: Chief Cato says one thing he's learned about working with people in crisis who are riding transit is that it takes time. Time to build the trust needed to get people to accept help.

 Chief Charlie Cato: When you have someone who has a mental health illness and you have someone who's, a substance abuse on top of that, they're in a very difficult state.

And so, we have to accept the fact that we're going to have to connect with those people multiple times and connect them to services that's not going to be successful the first time. They're going to fail out. They're going to change their mind.

They're going to fall back into their ways, and we have to be willing to connect them two, three, you know, four times, whatever it may be, because the only way to change their circumstances is to change those behaviors, those issues that are affecting them.  If we don't address the underlying factors that cause them to be unhoused, then they're still going to be unhoused.

And so that's the goal is for us to, to do that. If we don't do that, uh, we're going to be dealing with them over and over and over.

Nadine Lee: And certainly, the multiple touch points with them, you know, is really designed to build trust with them so that they will be open to and willing to accept some services from us.

Chief Charlie Cato: Yes, and just like the one success story I highlighted, we made two contacts with that gentleman, and he declined service, wouldn't talk to him.

On the third time he initiated, he saw, I believe, he saw what was going on. They were sincere in their offer to help. He had seen other people get service and get help. And so, when he was ready for the change, then he accepted. He reached out and they were there.

In these populations of, of the unhoused, we have three distinct groups. We have a group that's, lives on the financial edge and any, any financial catastrophe, whether it's a loss of a job, a vehicle breaking down, a medical issue that keeps them from going to work, causes them to not be able to meet their bills and they end up on the street, those are the easiest ones to reconnect and to help to get out of the situation.

And on the other end of the spectrum, just like any other data set, there's two ends and there's a big group in the middle. On the other end of the group are what I call service resistant folks. They are really, really lost in the mental illness or the substance abuse and it's very, very difficult to reach them.

And even with multiple attempts, we may never reach them. But there's a big group in the middle between those two extremes that we need to concentrate on. That's where we can make the most impact for them, for the people we're serving, and for the riders of our system. So that's who we're concentrating on is that big group in the middle

Nadine Lee: That’s such good information to understand better how, you know, how you can work better with these individuals.

Chief Charlie Cato: Absolutely. And that's why leveraging the partnerships with the existing social service agencies. Making sure we're connected to all of our service area city police departments and working hand in hand with them and not against them, so that we're not just bouncing people back and forth.

That's what I don't want us to lose sight of. These are human beings and so to treat them with dignity and respect was we have to work always in the interest of those folks. And if we do that, it'll be in the interest of our agency. It'll be in the interest of our riders if we do that. If we do the right thing.

Nadine Lee: Totally agree. Chief, thank you so much for being part of this interview. I'm really, really delighted to have you here at DART.

I tell people all the time, you're tough as nails, but you have the biggest heart.

And I really appreciate your insights, so thanks for joining us.

Chief Charlie Cato: Thank you.  

Nadine Lee: Chief Charlie Cato is the chief of the DART Police Department.

You're listening to Mobility in Motion. I'm your host, Nadine Lee. We'd love to hear from you. If you'd like to share your feedback with us, please email us at [email protected].

This episode was produced by The Glue and Jim Gates. Edited by Michael May. If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and tell a friend. Episodes come out every other week and are available on your favorite podcast platform.