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.
Over half of Americans, 60%, say a weeklong vacation is unaffordable-and even 49% report the small joy of going out to dinner is out of their budgets. Around 74% also say buying a new car is too expensive, but beyond these commonplace "luxuries," U.S. adults are battling the exorbitant costs of everyday essentials.
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.
A friend recently told me a story that made this reality impossible to ignore. Her elderly parents live near an elementary school not far from the nation's capital. For several years, they had been quietly raising money to provide groceries and basic supplies for families whose children were going hungry. When Republicans suspended SNAP benefits, the need surged overnight. What had been a steady act of care suddenly became an emergency response.
By launching a legal assault on the Fed, Mr Trump is trying to shift blame for borrowing costs. Yet despite controlling the presidency, Senate and the House, Republicans have passed little beyond a large tax-cutting bill that benefits the rich. They have not legislated on housing supply, childcare, healthcare costs or wages. Indeed most of their actions are worsening affordability, notably deferring action even though millions face a sharp rise in their health insurance bills.
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."
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.
"But I do believe that there is a really significant opportunity here for Democrats to take back the state of Florida - as long as we have a candidate who can relate to everyday people who keeps it focused on the most important pressing issues that affect people every single day in their lives like affordability and public education, and access to true freedoms across the state," Jenkins said.
"Affordability, affordability, affordability. That is the No. 1 issue," Jolly said, highlighting that the high cost of living is his campaign's central theme.
Blake emphasized the importance of addressing the affordability crisis with a rent freeze while supporting small property owners via mechanisms like a vacancy tax.
