The Affordability Election
Plus: Sofia Coppola, weed taxes, L.A. stupidity, and more...
Conventional wisdom says that this most recent election—in which Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, Mikie Sherrill was elected governor of New Jersey, and Abigail Spanberger was elected governor of Virginia—was an affordability election. "Democratic victories in New Jersey and Virginia were built on promises to address the sky-high cost of living in those states while blaming Mr. Trump and his allies for all that ails those places," writes Shane Goldmacher for The New York Times. "What unified the three victories was the Democratic candidates' ability to turn the affordability curse against the sitting president, transforming Republicans' 2024 advantage into a 2025 albatross," writes Derek Thompson for The Atlantic.
During the Biden years, voters routinely expressed their discontent at sky-high inflation, which hit a 9.1 percent year-over-year high in June 2022. It mostly recovered (due, in part, to aggressive action by the Fed), but the cumulative effect has made plenty of categories of goods extra expensive compared to what people had expected them to cost in recent memory. Then you add on President Donald Trump's tariffs—the effects of which have not yet fully been felt—and couple it with persistently high housing costs (for both renting and owning), and it's no wonder voters will pull the lever for the people who promise to take such issues seriously.
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Voters aren't crazy. They're reacting to real issues. But multiple things are happening at once, and it's worth sorting out true from false when it comes to the political narratives that compel voters to vote for candidates who are promising them lots of (purportedly) corrective meddling in the market.
Certain types of goods have gotten cheaper over time: manufactured goods in particular, including consumer electronics, but also food and drink, new cars, clothes, and home appliances. At the same time, the big categories have not: education (both higher and lower), healthcare, childcare, and housing. Those last two are especially relevant to today's young families who are just starting out: Though it's older people who are the biggest healthcare consumers on average, and older parents who tend to pay for their kids' educations (in the form of college, as most kids attend public school for most of the early years), it's younger people with less in personal savings that are hit hard by the costs of childcare and housing.
Which leads to this genre of tweet, bemoaning people's expectations for what type of life their income should be able to afford them:
Can a family live on one income today?
Yes, but not today's lifestyle on yesterday's budget.
Here's what it actually looks like:
• 1,000 sq ft home, not 2,500
• One used car
• One family phone — no smartphones for kids
• One TV, no subscriptions
• No microwave, no…— Will Ricciardella (@WillRicci) November 11, 2025
In some ways, this is correct: People do sometimes have ridiculous expectations for what type of lifestyle they ought to be able to afford given their income. But it's correct in that people romanticize the lifestyles of yesteryear without always recognizing the sacrifices and tradeoffs that came with those lifestyles. "The issue is that we've inflated 'middle class' to mean upper middle luxuries," writes the original poster. "Two cars, two iPhones, dining out, Amazon Prime, orthodontics, soccer trips, Disneyland, and a home office with Wi-Fi." I'm not sure "having wifi in your house"—thus allowing work from home, and for kids to do school projects and all the various administrative work that keeps a household running—is some crazy luxury, but he is correct in other ways. Our expectations for what middle-class existence looks like have changed. It used to be easier to have three kids because the form of childcare that really scales, to a greater degree than daycare, is having a mother to stay at home with all the kids—which used to be much more common than it is today. It used to be easier to have and maintain household vehicles because you had one single car and fewer expectations about how far you could go and what types of extracurriculars the kids needed to be shuttled around to. Vacations used to look like crummy road trips to visit relatives. We've inflated expectations, but we sometimes fail to recognize that, of course, there's some additional cost that comes with these loftier dreams.
But there are other factors that surely go into how expensive we perceive middle-class existence to be: Cost of repairing things vs. cost of replacing things looks mighty out of whack (which sometimes leads people to believe that the quality of consumer goods has drastically gone down). We also have very sticky ideas inside of our heads of what specific things (a basic lunch for a day in the office, a coffee, a carton of eggs) should cost, which, especially in recent years, has grown rather untethered from what they actually cost. And then there's the housing piece of it all, which few of us can be totally insulated from and which hits poor families especially hard, theorizes Mercatus Center scholar Kevin Erdmann.
One rebuttal to affordability discourse, lobbed by economists Alex Tabarrok and Jeremy Horpedahl, has been to cite data that reminds us that the middle class is disappearing as one-third of U.S. families now earn over $150,000.
These household wealth improvements aren't "because there are more wage earners or because workers are working more hours. It isn't due to inflation. The numbers are adjusted for inflation," writes Erdmann. But "this data is not fully adjusted for inflation.…The housing shortage creates rent inflation that is highly regressive, down to the neighborhood level. Go 5 miles in one direction to a neighborhood with residents earning more than $150,000 and go 5 miles in the other direction to a neighborhood with residents earning less than $50,000. It is likely that rents in the first neighborhood have risen along with general inflation and that rents in the second neighborhood have risen something like 40% more than general inflation since 2016."
The poor are hurt more than the rich, posits Erdmann: "Rent in the most affordable ZIP codes has increased by about 50% more than rent in the most expensive ZIP codes….Over the past decade, about one-quarter of the variance in rent has vanished."
Even the well-off aren't insulated from extremely high rents and housing stock mismatches: Rent costs an average New York City household about $30,000 per year, up 13.3 percent from just three years earlier, totally a more-than-30-percent chunk of average total household earnings. In cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles—other places where strivers move to benefit from agglomeration effects and chase the dream of upward mobility—the story is much the same (and getting worse).
Many families in these places lament the fact that housing stock is available for young people just starting out, and for those looking for much larger options, but that sort of middle-tier options (1,000 square feet, 3-bedroom, space for a family to sit and eat together) have grown less lucrative for developers to build, or near-permanently occupied by residents who find something and stay put, meaning much less turnover. "Median asking rent for an apartment with three or more bedrooms citywide is $4,800," reports The New York Times. A lot of this is due to building regulations that have meant housing supply has failed to match demand for many years now, but policies like rent stabilization and control have also distorted the market and reduced turnover so that even the upper-middle-class run into issues with housing allocation. In other words, regardless of your income, it can be very hard to find housing that best meets your needs in large metro area job centers.
Then there's another component to all of this discourse, less tethered to data: People sometimes use "cost of living" to refer to…generalized modernity blues. They feel a mismatch between what they thought the future would be like ("we wanted flying cars!") and what it actually entails ("instead we got 140 characters"); which areas we've made gains in vs. which areas of innovation have stagnated. They, perhaps, feel the "standard of living" is low, not because our material needs go unmet, but because spiritual needs have been pushed aside to make room for this material abundance that, in fact, just feels like a rat race we didn't want. Our standards may be a little better, but, hits blunt, are we really living, man? Cases in point below:
Standard of living here does not include the number of children one has, the number of people with meaningful social lives, and rich support systems. Yes, you've gotten immense gains in tech, and improved quality of food and entertainment, and educational opportunity.
But 50… https://t.co/wjxOeeXafA
— Michael Brendan Dougherty (@michaelbd) November 12, 2025
First, being the one to tell the first generation of Americans in our history that they will not live as well as their parents is not the flex you think it is.
Second, this is "avocado toast" nonsense. I want that 1000 sq foot condo - they don't build them. The lots are too… https://t.co/qt8WsnzMVD
— Inez Stepman ⚪️????⚪️ (@InezFeltscher) November 11, 2025
I actually don't find these critiques unreasonable, to be quite clear. People are reacting to problems both real and perceived, and they hit every income strata and family format differently. They didn't pop up overnight, but are in many cases continuations of trends a long time in the making. It's just that now politicians are seizing on the opportunity to make "affordability" the Big Thing electorally, and this means one thing and one thing only: Lots of big government fixes to problems that would best be solved by government getting more fully out of the way.
Scenes from New York: In this house WE RESPECT Sofia Coppola, gala honoree of the week, and acknowledge that even if Somewhere and The Godfather Part III were mediocre, The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette were really good and that Lost in Translation is perhaps the greatest of all time.
QUICK HITS
- "Arguing their industry is overtaxed and overregulated, nearly a hundred legal cannabis companies and their allies convinced the California legislature to give them a break, lowering the state excise tax from 19% to 15%," reports KQED. "Gov. Gavin Newsom approved the cut, which will take effect Oct. 1 of this year. But on the other side of the aisle, more than a hundred youth and environmental groups funded by cannabis tax revenues said kids are being betrayed." Lol.
- "For the first time in decades, the Los Angeles city council overhauled its rent control rules on Wednesday, sharply lowering the annual rent increases facing tenants in one of the country's most expensive cities," reports Politico. Whatever could go wrong?
- Hollywood is struggling.
- Rod Dreher's estimates for groyperism among Zoomer Hill staffers are wrong, says Emily Jashinsky:
Some gentle pushback on the great @roddreher! Worked the phones to try and confirm his report that 30-40% of Gen Z GOP staffers in DC are Groypers. Everyone I talked to disagreed. Here are seven well-placed sources from the White House to Capitol Hill. Full report is in @unherd. pic.twitter.com/EPvYWUJHzq
— Emily Jashinsky (@emilyjashinsky) November 13, 2025
- The incentive to avoid liability can lead to terrible outcomes. Case in point:
I read this yesterday and haven't been able to stop thinking about this. They waited half an hour for an ambulance. In Toronto. They asked if they should just take the dying man to the hospital. Somehow, they were told no. Wait. https://t.co/WAIRRiRp4S
— Kelsey Piper (@KelseyTuoc) November 13, 2025
