Town Hall Seattle Civics Series

Home to over 730,000 people, with close to four million people living in the metropolitan area, Seattle has the third-highest homeless population in the United States. In 2018, an estimated 8,600 homeless people lived in the city, a figure that does not include the significant number of “hidden” homeless people doubled up with friends or living in and out of cheap hotels. 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. Josephine Ensign is a professor in the School of Nursing and adjunct professor in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of Catching Homelessness: A Nurse’s Story of Falling through the Safety Net, Soul Stories: Voices from the Margins, and the Washington State Book Award Finalist Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in Seattle. Anna P