Skid Road

On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in an American City

By: Josephine Ensign

Narrated by: Holly Adams

In Skid Road, Josephine Ensign digs through layers of Seattle history - past its leaders and prominent citizens, respectable or not - to reveal the stories of overlooked and long-silenced people who live on the margins of society.

The sometimes fragmentary tales of these people, their lives and deaths, are not included in official histories of a place. How, Ensign asks, has a large, socially progressive city like Seattle responded to the health needs of people marginalized by poverty, mental illness, addiction, racial/ethnic/sexual identities, and homelessness? Drawing on interviews and extensive research, Ensign shares a diversity of voices within contemporary health care and public policy debates.

Informed by her own lived experience of homelessness, as well as over three decades of work as a family nurse practitioner providing primary health care to homeless people, Ensign is uniquely situated to explore the tensions between caregiving and oppression, as well as charity and solidarity, that polarize perspectives on homelessness throughout the country. A timely story in light of the ongoing health care reform debate, the affordable housing crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic, the stories from Skid Road illuminate issues surrounding poverty and homelessness throughout America.

©2021 Johns Hopkins University Press (P)2021 Tantor

Good story telling, little explanation of causes

Good stories. Great personal stories and wonderful "making real" the lives of peoples whom lived through it. Not a lot of technical cause and affect. And as a kid that visited first Ave. and was homeless in Seattle in the early 70's - I was looking for just a little more technical info.
But with that said, Thank you for writing this book as awareness is the we first step to a solution.

Not What I Expected

This book has no clear thesis. The historical lessons don’t add up to anything, and the last chapters are essentially a list of twenty policy ideas that have all failed—described in hindsight as if all of them were disingenuous to begin with. The implication is that the entire community has no skill, no resources, and no compassion.

The overriding theme of “Skid Row” is that Seattle has a history of greed and racism. That’s hardly revelatory. There are much more thoughtful books on this subject.