#affordability crisis

#affordability crisis

This technique injects a misleading or fictitious counter-narrative that can be compelling for people to believe. It can also be confusing: Who's telling the truth, what really happened?

When child care can cost more than your rent or a mortgage, or you have to sacrifice a paycheck in order to be able to take care of a loved one, that can motivate how people vote. Each election cycle, we see candidates recognizing that more and more.

Affordability has been, understandably, the watchword for Democratic candidates over the last year. After downplaying inflation under Joe Biden, the party learned a brutal lesson when Donald Trump rode the cost-of-living crisis back to the White House in 2024. In 2025, Zohran Mamdani put affordability at the center of his own campaign and surged from the back of the pack to City Hall.

It's so important that we have equal work for equal value. It's something that we need to continue to push for together. While Toronto is leading the way to close the gender pay gap, more work lies ahead.

The COVID fog shows up when decision-makers treat the 2.65% mortgage trough from January 2021 as a normal frame of reference rather than what it was, an extreme, unsustainable outlier created by a crisis policy response. Mortgage rates rose more than five percentage points from that trough, reaching 7.79% in October 2023 and easing to about 6.2% by September 2024.

City Council Speaker Julie Menin and Finance Chair Linda Lee said the proposal begins a dialogue about protecting New Yorkers and the city's fiscal future. Both will be leading the Council's negotiations with Mamdani's team in hammering out a final budget this June. At a time when New Yorkers are already grappling with an affordability crisis, dipping into Rainy Day reserves and proposing significant property tax increases should not be on the table, they said.

They are looking to withdraw the United States from the entire world so that we can turn into an age of authoritarianism, of authoritarians, that can carve out the world where Donald Trump can command the Western Hemisphere and Latin America as his personal sandbox, where Putin can saber-rattle around Europe and try to bully around our own allies there, and for essentially authoritarians to have their own geographic domains.

Bisbal was sipping an afternoon coffee at the Hamilton Family Restaurant not long after Vice President JD Vance rallied Republicans in a nearby suburb. In the Trump administration's second high-profile trip to Pennsylvania in a week, Vance acknowledged the affordability crisis, blamed it on the Biden administration and insisted better times were ahead. He later served food to men experiencing homelessness in Allentown.

Days before President Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term, he acknowledged the high prices Americans were seeing at the gas pump and grocery store, pledging to bring them down. "It's always hard to bring down prices when somebody else has screwed something up like [President Joe Biden] did," Trump said in a news conference in early January. "We're going to have prices down. I think you're going to see some pretty drastic price reductions."

"I'm talking about the cost-of-living crisis that's crushing families,"

The Brooklyn Democrat, who has frequently criticized the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which Mamdani is a member, issued a statement Friday afternoon announcing his support of the Mamdani campaign, stating that he deeply respects the will of the primary voters. He cited Mamdani's commitment to addressing the city's affordability crisis as his primary reason for supporting the nominee.

In 2025's first half, 36% of purchases statewide were made by investors up from 31% for all of 2024 and 16% at the recent low in 2020 as coronavirus was scrambling the economy. Or look at the change this way: Investors were tied to an average of 33% of all California homebuying in the past 18 months vs. 21% in 2015-23.

Home prices surged by more than 50% from early 2020 to mid-2024, creating a housing affordability crisis impacting those without real estate holdings.