Press Release

Introducing the Affordability Framework: A Tool for Understanding America’s Affordability Crisis

10. 21. 2025

Broken markets and broken incomes are driving America’s affordability crisis. A new framework maps its origins to inform future policy.

WASHINGTON—Today, Economic Security Project (ESP) unveiled the Affordability Framework, a new tool to help policymakers, advocates, and researchers better understand and tackle the root causes of unaffordability.

The affordability crisis is everywhere. People feel the pinch in grocery aisles, rental applications, daycare waitlists, medical costs, and energy bills. Headlines announce strong economic growth, yet for millions of families the essentials remain stubbornly out of reach. As the economy remains a central concern to policymakers and voters alike, elected officials are scrambling to address the crisis, both to help their constituents and safeguard their political futures.

As the recent passage of Congress’ massive tax bill is set to exacerbate families’ financial strain, the Affordability Framework introduces a roadmap to understanding how decades of neoliberal policymaking have eroded pathways to mobility for millions and stifled families’ access to resources, opportunities, and power, keeping them trapped in economic precarity.

While many policy proposals are siloed by sector or discipline, the Affordability Framework takes a comprehensive approach, looking across industries to identify broken markets and broken incomes as dual drivers of the affordability crisis. Markets aren’t working well enough to make basic essentials accessible and affordable to the public, and even when they do, inequality and insufficient incomes keep necessities persistently out of reach.

The affordability crisis is not the result of a single policy failure or downturn. It is a decades-long, deeply entrenched challenge hurting American families and workers. This Affordability Framework acknowledges the complexity and scale of the crisis and is designed to equip policymakers with a diagnostic tool to assess and inform policy ideas. The framework draws from leading ideas across various schools of thought to explain why things are unaffordable.

“Despite strong economic indicators, millions of people feel disenfranchised by their experience of the economy. Unaffordability is at the crux of this disconnect,” said Becky Chao, Director of Policy and Research at Economic Security Project. “Markets are rigged. Incomes are broken. A bootstraps approach isn’t going to save us. The Affordability Framework looks at the whole picture to inform policy ideas big enough to fix the crisis at hand.”

“America’s affordability crisis isn’t inevitable—it’s the result of decades of policies that have put corporate actors first and families’ needs second,” said Mike Konczal, Senior Director of Policy and Research at Economic Security Project. “As Americans are squeezed by worsening unaffordability, we must collectively make a different set of choices. The Affordability Framework is a rubric to help policymakers prioritize solutions that more effectively meet Americans’ needs.”

​​Since 2016, ESP has advocated for bold policies that build economic power for all Americans. The introduction of the Affordability Framework draws from and builds on ESP’s ongoing Road to Affordability Tour —a national effort to hear people’s experiences of the economy firsthand.

In the coming months, ESP will apply the Affordability Framework to inform policy recommendations specific to the key markets driving unaffordability. These recommendations will build on the theory of the case laid out in this framework and incorporate perspectives and experiences voiced by participants throughout the Affordability Tour.