This month’s Educated Activist Session will discuss Homelessness is a Housing Problem: How structural Problems Explain U.S. Patterns by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern. Colburn and Aldern shift their focus from the individual experiencing homelessness to the metropolitan area. Using accessible analysis, they test a range of conventional beliefs about what drives the prevalence of homelessness in a given city- including mental illness, drug use, poverty, weather, and low-income mobility- and find that none explain the regional variation observed across the country. Instead, they argue, housing market conditions such as the cost and availability of rental housing offer a far more convincing account.