26 Ideas For Solving The Affordability Crisis

Nearly one year ago, after Republicans were rejected in a series of state and local elections, Donald Trump expressed a belated recognition of the issue that postmortems were united in describing as the primary cause of his side’s defeats. “You know they have this new word called affordability, and they don’t talk about it enough,” the president told Fox News the morning after Election Day.

Opponents and commentatorsmocked Trump’s lexicographical discovery, pointing todictionary entries that trace use of affordable to 1647. But he was, broadly, correct. Affordability as a term was hardly part of the 20th century vocabulary: Google’s Ngram shows the word emerging in books beginning in 1973, just as another global oil crisis inspired a wave of inflation, andnever appeared in a party platform before 1980. Its emergence across political language in the subsequent years — through terms like “affordable housing” and the Affordable Care Act — gestured at a policy project that prioritized the cost of human basics. (Politicians could have just as easily promised more housing or better-quality medical care, after all.)

Now affordability is unavoidable, furniture acquired at a discount during a Covid-era redesign that remains stuck in the living room of American politics, too big to exit the way it came in. Everything is expensive, and always more so. Officeholders and candidates like Trump who tried to avoid it are under pressure to engage with the concept — whether as an agenda-setting priority, a marker of empathy or a rhetorical device to launder old causes into the new moment.

The 2026 election cycle marks the maturation of our new affordability-centered era, no longer a nagging artifact of the pandemic price shock but a permanent issue. The immediate aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis made voters think of themselves foremost as homeowners, investors, savers and taxpayers. By 2015, when Trump and Bernie Sanders emerged as presidential contenders, they reoriented voters toward the mindset of the wage-earning laborer, struggling to keep one’s job amid industrial transformation and international competition. Now just about every policy conversation — including those over energy, health care, education, housing and agriculture — is filtered first through the experience of the consumer.

There are critics of this obsession who see affordability pushing aside other ways of measuring economic power. Oren Cass, founder of the conservative think tank American Compass, argues that treating Americans foremost as consumersfails to respect them as workers. Antitrust crusader Lina Khan, now an adviser to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani — perhaps the quintessential U.S. politician of the affordability era — haspushed for a more capacious view of markets. (Amazon, after all, has helped to bring down the prices Americans pay for all sorts of goods, but at what Khan and others say is the expense of sellers and the choice they present consumers.)

But for now, affordability is here to stay. So we sent reporters across POLITICO’s global newsroom hunting for solutions — from the reasonable to the questionable, presented without judgment and in no particular order — that capture the breadth of the discussion no politician can ignore.

—Sasha Issenberg, managing editor for enterprise