What Americans Really Mean by 'Affordability' [View all]

What is the affordability crisis all about?

Is it just a new buzzword for longstanding economic discontent? Is it a mirage, with Americans living better than ever but in shock at high prices? Or is there something the usual economic data is missing?

The latest New York Times/Siena University poll doesn’t definitively answer these questions, but it offers some important clues. Most of all, it suggests that “affordability” is about the rising price of entry for a middle-class life: buying a home; paying for child care, college and health care; saving for retirement, and so on.

These are familiar issues in American politics, but they add up to an entirely different problem under the all-encompassing label of affordability. The difficulty of purchasing a ticket to the middle class has created a sense that the economy isn’t working, even when the economy isn’t so bad by usual measures like growth or unemployment. Indeed, it may not even be useful to think about affordability as a problem with the “economy” or even “inflation” as conventionally understood. And it helps explain why the young people struggling to secure a middle-class life have expressed so much more dissatisfaction with the economy than older voters.

By a two-to-one margin, voters say a middle-class life is out of reach for most Americans. Whether voters are being realistic or not, their expectations aren’t being met: A majority say they can’t afford the life they think they ought to be able to afford. With numbers like these, it’s easy to see why affordability is poised to be one of the big issues in the midterm campaign. (You can read the full story on the poll here.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/upshot/poll-affordability-housing-prices.html

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Well, duh.