The Skid Road podcast amplifies a diversity of voices about homelessness and displacement in Seattle and in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia. The podcast series challenges us to learn from the past, from people with the lived experience of homelessness and displacement, and from people tasked with addressing homelessness in order to make more informed policy and program choices.
This past week, I was in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia, seeking a better understanding of its non-whitewashed history of displacement and systemic injustices, and how these histories reverberate today. I view this as a continuation of my Skid Road project, just based in Richmond instead of Seattle, where I currently live and work. This project will include oral history interviews, archival research, and immersive site visits and will draw on my experience as a public health nurse in Richmond in the 1980s.
First up is this interview I had with the Rev. Benjamin Campbell, pastoral associate at the historic St. Paul's Episcopal Church, pastor emeritus at Richmond Hill, civil rights activist, and author of Richmond's Unhealed History. I interviewed him in the library of St. Paul's, and you can hear church bells in the background.
Our conversation covered a lot of territory, from him quoting from "The Second Coming" by Irish poet William Butler Yeats, invoking the White Lion (the English privateer ship in 1619 that is the first documented arrival of enslaved Africans in what became the United States), Richmond's infamous Lumpkin's 'slave jail' known as the Devil's Half Acre (changed to God's Half Acre by his enslaved wife Mary after his death/after the Civil War when she turned the building into a school for Black students), the uncovering of Richmond's prominent role in the domestic slave trade, powerful white Virginians fighting desegrgation of schools, and the white gentrification of the traditially Black neighborhood of Church Hill (where I worked as a field/public health nurse in the turbulent 1980s).
15 Sept 2026
A Conversation with Sharon Lee
Sharon Lee is the founding executive director of Seattle-based Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI). Celebrating its 35th year of operation, LIHI has established 4,500 affordable housing units in Washington State. These units include transitional housing, Housing First, and Tiny House villages. In addition, they run the essential Urban Rest Stops in Seattle to provide the too scarce hygiene resources needed by people experiencing homelessness. Here's my conversation with her about her work and what led her to this vital work.
8 Sept 2026
A Conversation with Congressman Jim McDermott
A few months before his retirement, I sat down with Congressman Jim McDermott to talk about his work, both as a child psychiatrist volunteer in the late 1960s at Seattle's Open Door Clinic (our first free clinic) and as a US Congressman for Washington's 7th District from 1989-2017. In this interview, he talks about his direct healthcare experience working with teens with behavioral health issues, and his work in Congress to expand services for foster youth until age 21, his work on the AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s-1990s, helping draft the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program and Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS. Since his retirement in 2018, he splits his time between homes in Seattle and near Bordeaux, living mostly in a small farming community in France, caring for goats and fretting about the state of our country. A US Navy veteran of the Vietnam War, he is deeply patriotic and progressive. Listen to what he has to say.
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