I’ve spent years studying economic data. These Americans taught me what ‘affordability’ really means
Parma
(CNN) — A Reporter’s Notebook from four cities, 5,000 miles, three dozen interviews and the people I can’t stop thinking about.
We were a few minutes into a drive when Jolene Simecek said something that left me speechless.
She was steering me through Parma, Ohio, narrating the new subdivisions as they slid past — block after block of brand-new homes she’s made her peace with never owning. Around here, she said, they don’t last on the market long enough to put in an offer. Her parents never built the kind of wealth you hand down. So you rent, and you work harder — 16-hour days, never home — and the math still won’t move. Not for her, not for most people her age.
“What kind of pressure does that put on you?” I asked.
She didn’t hesitate. “It’s not fun. I wanted a yard for my kid. Just the normal American dream — a house, a picket fence, a yard. And it just seems like that’s more and more out of touch. Not reality.”
I sat in silence. When I got back to DC and watched the tape, the weight of the moment was visible — a couple of seconds of dead air while I sat with what she’d said.
Here’s what the camera couldn’t pick up. For months before I booked a flight, I’d been buried in economic data, chasing a theory I’d never said out loud: that the cost-of-living crisis wasn’t just making life expensive. It was eviscerating the deal we’d all signed onto and believed. Go to school, get a job, work hard and do the right things. Buy the first home, raise the family, build a little wealth, buy the bigger home.
Jolene is 42, a single mom, working since she was 13. She gave up her apartment and went $15,000 into debt to go back to nursing school, betting on herself and the shortage in healthcare. The tradeoff: her sister’s basement, because there were no other options. Her new roommates are five and three.
As we drove past her old apartment complex, she walked me through the math that forced her to leave. Her rent had gone from $785 to nearly $1,600 — for the same unit – over the course of seven years. Her income hadn’t moved.
“I’ve already paid a quarter million dollars in rent in my life,” she said. “I should already have the home with the equity paid off.” Then her voice trailed off. “But I didn’t make the right decisions.”
Jolene and I are the same age, same graduating class, same state, just opposite corners – her side of Cleveland, my side of Toledo. For a while our lives ran parallel. Then they split, and I can’t tell you where or why. She did all the things we were told to do, and she’s living in her sister’s basement. In the weeks after, the only answer I could come up with was an old proverb: There but for the grace of God go I.
What I built before I ever left
“Affordability” is everywhere now — a clipboard word that flattens Jolene into a data point shorthanded for poll-tested talking points. A word that detaches itself from the actual people experiencing the long-fraying fabric that underpins the economic promise of America tear straight through.
The stock market sets new records on a weekly, sometimes daily basis. Corporate earnings, productivity growth and consumer spending are all consistently robust. Those who do well are unquestionably doing even better right now, and, if you look deeper into the numbers, driving more and more of the broader economy.
Those with more modest means are falling further behind and, perhaps most alarmingly, finding fewer pathways to the economic mobility that has helped define the American dream.
The ripple effect of that dynamic is now a defining feature of the country – economically, societally, politically.
So I went looking for what sits underneath those topline economic numbers. Few households are undone by one ER visit or one flat tire. What breaks you is the accelerating climb of the big costs — housing, childcare, the vanishing retirement floor — until a household sits so close to the edge that the flat tire nudges them off the cliff.
This project isn’t a ledger. It doesn’t try to catalog every line-item pressing on every American household.
Instead, I set out to trace the structural weaknesses that form the increasingly brittle architecture from which thousands of individual hardships descend. One household’s squeeze may look nothing like its neighbor’s, but trace each far enough back and the same few fractures are doing the work.
Cleveland: the “most affordable” big city in the Midwest, where home prices have surged more than anywhere in the country. Boston: childcare, the expense that ripples through everything. Atlanta: glittering on the top line while real inflation for people just getting by runs closer to 8 percent. Tampa: where the retirement bargain comes apart.
‘I sleep in my car’
People let a stranger with a camera into the rawest corners of their lives and told the truth about the most sensitive subject in American life.
In a suburb outside Boston, I met Greg and Audrey Dunn, two working parents making $150,000, with three kids under four and a childcare bill six to seven times their mortgage. They’ve borrowed against the house and sold a property to cover their childcare bills. They insisted my crew sit for family dinner first — the soft anarchy familiar to a father of four. Late that night they laid their printed bills across the kitchen island and walked me through them, line by line. “It has to work,” Audrey told me.
In Atlanta, Mayra Martinez and I walked the Beltline — the gleaming greenway everyone points to as proof of an economic boom. In her eyes it was the opposite: the clearest picture of everything her immigrant family was never offered. The home she grew up in, that her family could have bought for $100,000 a decade ago, is worth seven times that now. Her father works construction; her mother cleans houses. They built and maintained this place, I said, and now can’t afford to enjoy it. “Exactly,” she said.
Phebie White is 68, a lifetime of work behind her. Her fixed Social Security check doesn’t move; her rent climbed from $850 to $1,250 over the course of a decade. As we sat across the kitchen table in her one-bedroom Tampa apartment, she walked me through the arithmetic of a single flat tire — without $80, she drove on the doughnut spare until she could scrape together the money for a real replacement. What you do when your income’s frozen and everything else isn’t? “You pray, for real. Or you get another job — and a lot of times they don’t wanna hire old people like me.”
The one bill Phebie never misses is her car insurance. Confused, I asked her to explain. She has to keep it paid, she said, in case she has to sleep in the car.
That answer left me visibly taken aback on camera — and still unprepared for Elen Trosino. She arrived at a free clinic in full scrubs; I assumed she was a volunteer. She’d come straight from her nursing job, and she was a patient. She’d beaten cancer the year before, but it had obliterated her finances. “The person I live with wanted me to move out, so I did. Problem is where will I go? I sleep in my car.”
“Wait, really? Right now?”
“Like a week now. Finding a room is easy, but what about the down payment? The security deposit? I just started working this year. Last year was a battle. So, I don’t know.”
The fractures in the foundation
Set Phebie and Elen side by side and they share almost nothing — different races, ages, professions and politics. What they share is the foundation. What they share is what underpins the frustration, anxiety and fear consuming so many households that cuts across race, gender, generation, geography and a widening swath of income levels.
Their stories are the story.
To sit on camera with a stranger and walk line by line through your finances — to share fear and feelings of failure with such candor is an extraordinary act of trust. It’s also a window into something else I heard repeatedly over the course of my travels: just how alone, just how unseen they all feel.
And yet, under daily pressure that would buckle many of us, they were more resilient, more openhearted, more alive than almost anyone I’ve talked to on camera. Each and every one of them.
“I feel like it’ll pay off in the end, and I’ll pay off my school debt and stay here as long as I can and as long they’ll keep me,” Jolene told me as we sat in her sister’s basement, now doubling as her apartment, every inch covered by still-packed boxes. “Then buy a home and one day be able to retire, and we can actually enjoy everything I’ve worked for.”
A relentless reality
In the weeks since my travels, there’s been what I can only describe as an auto-play loop of moments from those conversations running through my brain. During my commute to and from work. Lying in bed at night. In the middle of my 10-year-old’s travel baseball games, of all places.
I came into these interviews immersed in reams of data and economic research that painted a far deeper, rapidly accelerating systemic rupture. I came home unable to stop thinking about the people.
But what’s really stayed with me isn’t any single moment or individual hardship. It’s the all-consuming relentlessness of what they all faced — when “hard” isn’t a rough patch but a permanent condition. I grew up on the idea that this was the country where the arc eventually bends. What I kept hearing was the inverse: people who put their heads down for 30, 40, 50 years and watched the math work against them, every month.
I’ve thought a lot about Phebie’s line that she can’t dwell on the bills because the second she does, she’ll “get stuck.” That isn’t a person having a hard time. That’s someone treading open water who has figured out that the only way not to drown is to never stop kicking.
The US economy asks millions to do exactly that, indefinitely — then points at the calm surface and calls it a healthy sea.
“I don’t know how more people aren’t talking about it because this isn’t how it should be,” Jolene said. “I work hard. I don’t expect anything for free. I just don’t know why it isn’t a little bit easier.”
We’d finished our interview and continued chatting as the crew broke down.
“It didn’t feel like this when we were growing up.”
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