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problems, although they tended to suggest that stress causes people to become "run-down" or have "lower immunity," which in turn leads to poor health. Participant: Stress leads to depression and that leads to an unhealthy lifestyle, unhealthy conditions. — Participant: If my utilities were down, if I couldn't sleep at night because I heard gunshots, that's stressful. If I had to worry about my house being broken into, that's stressful. It wears you down eventually. D. !e Do No Harm model. #e public understands housing as something that can have negative impacts—it can threaten your safety, expose you to contaminants, make you sick, stress you out—but not as something that can structure positive well-being. In this way, good housing is understood simply as "housing that doesn't hurt you." It is something that doesn't put you in physical danger and doesn't make you sick. Interviewer: So how does the fact that everything is functioning properly affect your health? Participant: Well, if your water is not running, there is bacteria that grows. So if you are not able to clean yourself, then you are at risk of getting sickness of a disease from the bacteria growing on your body, or even if you get dehydrated because you don't have any water at home to drink. But if you do have that then you don't have to worry about that because you can take a bath, you can drink water if you need to. — Participant: You need to have the things that we, in the modern age, have come to take for granted like adequate heating or cooling. You hear about heatwaves where people literally die because they don't have cooling in their building and they're elderly. E. !e Mentalism model. When discussing poverty and homelessness, participants frequently drew upon the foundational American cultural model of Mentalism. 7 According to this way of thinking, homelessness is the result of internal individual traits, such as lack of motivation and willpower, and has little do to with broader systems, contexts, or policies. Participants used this model to reason that some people cannot afford housing because they "choose not" to "nd jobs. While the Mentalism model was most o%en invoked to explain homelessness, participants also employed this model to explain that some people live in substandard, unhealthy housing because they "don't try hard enough" or "care enough" to "nd better housing situations. In short, the Mentalism model attributes responsibility for the negative health outcomes associated with low-quality housing to individuals themselves and their complacency or lack of effort. "A House, a Tent, a Box": Mapping the Gaps Between Expert and Public Understanding of Healthy Housing 24

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