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I. Introduction Housing is deeply implicated in many of our most important social issues—health, economic opportunity and mobility, racial and economic segregation, education, and aging, to name a few—yet the issue rarely rises to the top of American political and social discourse. Coverage of housing in the news media fails to explain how quality, affordable housing can improve outcomes across a range of social and economic domains, and advocates similarly leave out this part of the story. As a result, current framing of housing fails to explain the broader signi"cance of the issue for society. 1 Moving housing issues to the forefront of our national conversation requires new ways of framing the issue. An effective reframing strategy can foster better understanding of housing issues, raise the salience of these issues in public thinking, and generate support for needed policies. #is report represents the "rst step in a larger project to develop such a strategy. #e project is a collaboration with Enterprise Community Partners, the National Center for Healthy Housing, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). #is report attends to the range of ways in which housing affects well-being, with a particular focus on issues of healthy housing. In later stages of the project, FrameWorks researchers will develop and empirically test framing tools and strategies, but in order to understand the speci"c challenges these tools must address, as well as the type of tools and strategies that are likely to work, we must "rst examine the cultural landscape around housing issues. #e core of this report is an exploration of the cultural models 2 —the implicit, shared understandings, assumptions, and patterns of reasoning—that the American public draws upon to think about housing in general and healthy housing in particular. #is research differs from standard public opinion research, which documents what people say by conducting polls or focus groups. #e research described here documents how people think, and parses out the assumptions and thought processes that inform what people say and how they form judgments and opinions. #is cultural-cognitive approach is powerful because identifying ways of thinking is key to developing more effective and strategic communications. By understanding how the public thinks about housing, communicators can better predict how their messages are likely to be received, avoid triggering unproductive ways of thinking about the issue, and leverage productive understandings to get their message across. Moreover, understanding how people think helps to identify those areas most in need of attention—the areas where public understandings consistently impede productive thinking—and yields hypotheses about what types of communications tools and strategies are likely to be effective. #is report begins by describing the "untranslated expert story" of housing and its role in shaping health and well-being. #is account comprises experts' shared understandings of how housing affects health and well-being, and includes the policy and programmatic directions that experts argue could improve housing and lead to better outcomes. #is untranslated story represents the content to be communicated to the public through a reframing strategy. "A House, a Tent, a Box": Mapping the Gaps Between Expert and Public Understanding of Healthy Housing 3

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