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individual while obscuring broader community context. #e model sets up an opposition between the interior of an individual's home and the outside world, making it difficult to think about how homes are situated in communities. To leverage the productive aspects of the model, communicators must put the community at the center of the story, casting housing as a key part of how communities protect the well-being of their members. In short, communicators must seek to expand the Protection model to include housing factors beyond the home and explain how these factors can have protective functions. What Is Good Housing? When asked to think about housing quality—what differentiates good from bad housing—people draw on several deep cultural models. #ese models "gure prominently in people's thinking about the relationship between housing and health outcomes. Most important among these is a Consumerism model, which dominates thinking about housing quality and powerfully shapes people's thinking about healthy housing. A. !e Consumerism model. According to the Consumerism model, housing is a marketplace in which individual actors pursue their own self-interest by purchasing housing that maximizes value, understood as the balance of bene"ts weighed against costs. Consumers purchase housing, either by buying or renting, from producers who operate to maximize pro"t in a free market system based on competition and the rules of supply and demand. According to this way of thinking, access to quality, healthy housing depends on what you can afford: some people can afford high-quality, healthy housing, and some can't. Participants frequently associated good housing with amenities—consumer goods that cost extra in the housing market. If you pay less, you get less. Participant: Good housing? Amenities. Good laundry facilities. I would say the control of air conditioning and heating. #at would be great. — Participant: Good housing would be having enough square footage or space for what you would deem to be an acceptable lifestyle—room, say, for your clothing, room for your food in the kitchen, room to sit down and eat your meals. — Participant: More money helps you get better stuff. When people are thinking in this way, differences in housing quality, and the fact that some people live in very low-quality housing, are viewed as natural and unobjectionable. Differences in housing quality are understood to be an inevitable—and sometimes even a desirable—feature of the market, and, because their existence shows that the market is working. #is model constitutes a deep and powerful challenge, as it rationalizes disparities in housing quality and allows people to justify unhealthy, unsafe housing as a necessary part of a properly functioning housing market. "A House, a Tent, a Box": Mapping the Gaps Between Expert and Public Understanding of Healthy Housing 19

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