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Participant: #e government only has so much money and a lot of people are against —they just think that you're feeding the poor or not giving them motivation to get better or improve themselves. — Participant: I mean, nothing's for free, you know. Uncle Sam is going to get his, whoever's uncle he is. C. !e Government as Protector model. Despite people's dominant model of government as corrupt and inept, there were some instances in which participants did attribute responsibility for solutions to government. When thinking about regulations in rental housing, participants understood government as a necessary protector of vulnerable individuals. 9 While this model is limited in its scope of application, participants consistently assumed that government has a critical role to play when individuals are particularly susceptible to being harmed by the direct actions of others. Participants recognized, in particular, that landlords of rental units, because of "nancial motivations, might not improve conditions on their own. #erefore, participants supported the idea that government should be responsible for making and enforcing regulations to ensure that landlords meet certain basic housing standards. Participant: It should be an inspection done on the roof, the electrical outlets, the wiring of the place, everything that an inspector would do. And this should be done— wiring every "ve years and other stuff more frequently, every year. — Participant: I would implement those same high standards that Section 8 has for low- income housing. It would be mandated across the city to landlords automatically. D. !e Lawbreakers model. One of the dominant ways that the public thinks about undocumented immigrants is through what FrameWorks has called a Rule of Law cultural model. 10 When invoking this model, undocumented residents are considered to have forfeited their rights or privileges by "choosing" to break the law to enter the country. When this model was applied to housing, it blocked participants' thinking about how to improve outcomes for this particular population by setting up a way of thinking in which undocumented immigrants are viewed as a group of people who do not "deserve" access to public resources because of their status as lawbreakers. Participant: If you're legally here in this country—if you're either an American citizen or if you're an immigrant that came here legally, I think you deserve a house, healthy housing…. But I feel if you're illegally here, then I don't think that you deserve that, because you would probably be taking the place of somebody who's here legally, you know. "A House, a Tent, a Box": Mapping the Gaps Between Expert and Public Understanding of Healthy Housing 27

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