Way Home: Journeys through Homelessness

by Josephine Ensign

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.

344 pages, Hardcover

Published November 19, 2024

About the author

Josephine Ensign is a professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, where she teaches community health, health policy, and narrative medicine. A graduate of Oberlin College, the Medical College of Virginia, and Johns Hopkins University, she has been a nurse for over thirty years, providing health care for homeless and marginalized populations. She is an alumna of Hedgebrook and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Her essays have appeared in The Sun, The Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Pulse, Silk Road, The Intima, The Examined Life Journal, Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine, and the nonfiction anthology I Wasn’t Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse, edited by Lee Gutkind. Catching Homelessness is her first book. She lives in Seattle. Her first book, Catching Homelessness: A Nurse's Story of Falling Through the Safety net was published in 2016. It was named the American Journal of Nursing 2017 Book of the Year for creative works.

Reviews

[Jennifer Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book for Seattle residents to read. My only feedback is for the author to address more solutions to the issues addressed in the book. This books generates awareness for the complexity of our unhoused neighbors. My hope is that we come together, collectively, to create more housing & services for those who are marginalized.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not get to finish this book, and I realize that I am unlikely to prioritize it at this point (although I would certainly reread it in the future).

The content is hyper-local to a specific place and time but is likely to be useful for most cities, although it may become outdated. Even as trends and situations change, this would still be useful for providing historical context. Recommended now for public libraries in most cities, and long-term for university libraries and for public libraries in very large cities with collections on issues experienced by unhoused populations.

Program topics: none 
Discussion prompts: none