NEW SERIES: The Affordability Trap
Promising to lower prices is a winning campaign hand. Delivering on those promises is the challenge. Our new series looks at the affordability crisis, and why it's so difficult to address.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Email Martin
In 2024, Donald Trump won back the White House running on promises to “end inflation” and “immediately bring prices down.” More than a year into his second term, inflation remains stubbornly high — though it’s growing less quickly than during COVID — and prices on gas, new cars, homes, and food continue to climb.
Last November, Virginia voters overwhelmingly supported Abigail Spanberger who rolled into governor’s office on the back of delivering an Affordable Virginia Plan aimed at making healthcare and home ownership and energy prices more-affordable for more people.
On March 14 — adjournment day for the Virginia General Assembly — Spanberger celebrated the passage of numerous affordability bills:
The General Assembly has passed a slate of legislation squarely focused on making life less expensive for Virginians. I’m particularly proud to see lawmakers pass our entire Affordable Virginia Agenda to drive down housing, healthcare, and energy costs for Virginians across our Commonwealth.
A year from now, will this legislation affect significant reductions in living costs for Virginians?
Time will tell the tale. But there is reason to be skeptical.
While there are things that governments can do to affect prices, there’s relatively little that governments can do to override market forces in the near term.
Contrary to his promises, Donald Trump has not overseen an economic revival. And in important ways, the levers he has pulled are making things worse. Tariffs are adding cost to doing business. And the recent surge in gasoline prices is directly tied to the war in Iran.
His voters are noticing, and many that he convinced to vote for him in 2024 are now turning away. Young voters in particular — those hit hardest by the affordability crisis — are increasingly disgruntled and looking elsewhere for answers.
Should Spanberger’s policies drive prices down, it would become a national success story. If they do little to move the needle, however, she’ll have a difficult time convincing voters to stick with her.
Affordability, in other words, is a great topic to run on. It is a decidedly more-difficult platform from which to govern.
There are more forces outside of government’s ability to affect prices than there are tools governments can use to affect prices.
The Great Disconnect
Since January, the Advance has been talking with state legislators, local board members, nonprofit leaders, as well as experts in various sectors like health and housing and energy to better understand the affordability crisis, and what it will take to make it easier for everyday citizens to reach the American dream of home ownership, financial stability, and helping the next generation to get a solid start on its future.
Their answers make clear that “affordability” will be no easy goal to achieve.
Consider housing.
There is general consensus that considerably more housing needs to be constructed in order to meet the current need. In their book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson point to all the issues that prevent us from building the housing we need. Zoning is too strict, red tape clogs the permitting process, and we aren’t building “at scale.”
The answer? More density, more by-right development, and rolling back environmental studies that add costs and slow down development.
Makes sense. But good sense does not policy make.
In the greater Fredericksburg region, the past five years have seen a steady drumbeat of resistance to each of these ideas. Citizens in Fredericksburg have been quite vocal about not increasing density requirements in the city for fear of ruining its small-town character.
In the counties, by-right development is often slammed by members of local boards of supervisors because they worry about the infrastructure burdens it places on the locality.
Talk of rolling back environmental studies raises flags for environmentalists and can mobilize people to effectively terminate projects.
In other words — while we all agree that life is unaffordable for too many of our fellow citizens, too few are willing to accept the changes necessary to rectify the situation.
It’s an example of the great disconnect between the community we say we want, and the community that we’re willing to create.
Bridging the Divide
Beginning next week, the Advance will look at the affordability challenges confronting our region and state in housing, healthcare, and energy.
Each piece will explore the challenges before us, what it takes to address each, and how far we as a society are collectively willing to go to address the problems.
The series will also challenge readers to look at their own lives and explore what we are willing to tolerate for the common good.
We’ll also explore where communities are rising to the challenge and finding success.
We encourage you to send examples of communities that are successfully addressing affordability. Send your ideas to the editor, Martin Davis, at mdavis@fxbgadvance.com.
Local Obituaries
To view local obituaries or to send a note to family and loved ones, please visit the link that follows.
Martin,
I just read your kickoff piece for “The Affordability Trap” series and wanted to thank you for tackling this head‑on. You capture something most coverage misses: affordability is easy to run on and brutally hard to govern on, especially when the key levers are scattered across federal, state, and local levels and collide with local preferences.
One lens that might complement your series is to make those layers really explicit for readers:
- What *federal* policy can realistically do in the near term (tax credits, subsidies, conditional funding) and what it can’t.
- What *state* policy controls (utility regulation, statewide housing and health‑care frameworks, guardrails on local zoning) and how much of Spanberger’s Affordable Virginia agenda lives there.
- What’s squarely on *local* shoulders (land use, density, by‑right development, fees, infrastructure timing) and how often our own resistance in the Fredericksburg region blocks the very changes we say we want.
A second angle that feels just as important is to bring the private sector into the frame as explicitly as government. Most of the prices that feel unbearable to people—rents and mortgages, hospital bills and premiums, utility bills, groceries, cars—are ultimately set by private actors operating inside the legal and regulatory environment we’ve built. It might help readers if each piece spelled out, side by side, (1) what government can actually do in that sector, (2) what private firms and investors are doing in response, and (3) where community choices and NIMBYism reinforce or counter those incentives.
Layered on top of that is profit itself. In housing, health care, and energy we need profit to attract private investment, but when policy‑created scarcity and market power let profits and asset values outrun wages, the result is structurally unaffordable basics. Naming where profit is productive (supporting new supply and innovation) and where it has become more extractive (mark‑ups and returns that households simply can’t sustain) could help readers see why affordability feels less like a temporary spike and more like a built‑in feature of the system.
Applied to housing, health care, and energy, that kind of map—federal vs. state vs. local, public vs. private, productive vs. extractive profit—could make the “great disconnect” you describe very concrete: the gap between the community we say we want and the policy and market choices we’re collectively willing to tolerate to get there.
In any case, I’m glad you’re inviting examples of communities that are getting this right, and I appreciate the Advance using its platform to push us all to examine our own role in the affordability puzzle.