Way Home: Journeys Through Homelessness

Can one city’s solutions to homelessness help the United States face the issue nationally?

The United States grapples with a solution for the unhoused by employing a patchwork of uneven rhetoric and policy. How can policymakers and public health professionals address this urgent problem in more innovative and sustainable ways? In Way Home, Josephine Ensign explores the contemporary landscape of homelessness by focusing on Seattle in King County to assess how their innovative local solutions can be scaled up nationally.

From consumer-led shelter programs to the expansion of the Housing First model of care, Seattle-King County is a leader in this area. Ensign assesses the effectiveness of policies such as child tax credits, rental subsidies, eviction moratoriums, and programs for vehicle residents. As an expert in the field who has also experienced homelessness, Ensign draws from an extensive oral history project to share poignant firsthand accounts that inform and enrich her storytelling. This narrative incorporates human rights, support services, public health issues, and a path forward that acknowledges the true realities of people living unhoused.

Amid the rapidly evolving public health and political landscape accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Way Home deepens our understanding of the historical roots of homelessness and highlights innovative public policy and program efforts at the national, state, and local levels to address it.

Josephine Ensign (SEATTLE, WA) is a professor in the School of Nursing and an adjunct professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the author of Catching Homelessness: A Nurse’s Story of Falling Through the Safety Net and Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in an American City.