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Way Home

Journeys through Homelessness

Josephine Ensign

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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...

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.

Reviews

Reviews

What Ensign accomplishes in her new book is remarkable. Way Home is one of the most important books on homelessness I've read, and I couldn't put it down.

As a nurse, researcher, advocate, and person with lived experience of homelessness, Josephine Ensign invites us into the lives of people experiencing homelessness with this beautifully written, exhaustively researched, and evidence-based work. Way Home emphasizes the need for individual and societal empathy in any successful and durable solution to homelessness.

Ensign masterfully and memorably portrays individuals and their homelessness in the larger context of societal structures and policies. I will never forget the tragedy or the strength of her subjects. Way Home is valuable for practitioners, policymakers, and students in understanding the causes, effects, and solutions that can help us end homelessness.

Way Home explores Seattle's homelessness crisis through the lives of those who have experienced it. With depth and empathy, and drawing on decades of experience working with homeless communities as a nurse practitioner, Ensign examines causes and promising solutions such as safe parking programs and the Housing First model, while sharing stories of those affected. Through deep research and evocative prose, she sheds much-needed light on this complex issue and its human cost.

About

Book Details

Release Date
Publication Date
Status
Preorder
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
344
ISBN
9781421450230
Illustration Description
10 b&w photos
Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Prologue
1. Prelude to Compassion
2. Seattle is Dying
3. Compromised
4. Lifelines
5. Contesting Spaces
6. Displaced
7. Home Base
8. Roll On
9. Doorway
10. Welcome In
11. Way Home
Epilogue
Index

Author Bio
Josephine Ensign
Featured Contributor

Josephine Ensign, RN, DrPH

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.