Inequality and opportunity in America breaks down to these Big 5 forces: Housing, Healthcare, Education, Employment, and Incomes. Without any single one of these forces going the right way for a household in the US, any chance at upward mobility or achieving the American Dream completely falls apart. Following last night’s monumental blue wave, I wanted to write about what we heard matters deeply to Americans over the last several months, and also about the incredible uphill battle that still remains to put households back on track towards opportunity. We tend to look at these Big 5 forces in isolation, in part because that is how our government agencies are set up. We have HUD which looks at housing, and HHS which looks at healthcare, and DOL which looks at jobs. But none of these forces exists in isolation. If a person loses their job, they usually lose their health insurance, and when they lose their job, they also lose their ability to pay rent. Depending on who you are, you may say that one of these forces is far more important than the other: there is the Housing Theory of Everything camp; the Cash is King camp; the Health is Wealth camp; the Heckman-Horace Mann camp, and the Dignity of Work camp, the Everything is Affordability camp, so on and so on with various factions within. The Big Five forces shape an interconnected story of affordability in America, helping explain why some people fall into poverty while others rise into prosperity. Before diving in—I wanted to share the exciting news I revealed last week that The Opportunity Map is now available for pre-order! I’m giving away lots of behind the scenes content for people who get in now, so make sure to get your orders in today. 1. Housing A record 22.7 million renters, or 49% of all renting Americans, were cost burdened in 2024, meaning they spent more than 30% of their income on rent. That number has increased by 2.3 million over the last 7 years. More than half of those households, 12.1 million, are severely cost burdened, meaning they spend over 50% of their income on housing. For families making less than $30,000, 83% are cost burdened. Those households had just $250 a month left on average for food, transportation, childcare, and everything else after paying rent. Housing in America was not always like this. In 1989, only 39% of households were rent burdened. Between 1989 and today, rental prices have increased 4x faster than incomes have risen. Today, 54% of households are rent burdened. But the issues aren’t just for renters, they are for homeowners too, and owning a home has long been a cornerstone of the American Dream. In 1989, the median home price was $120,000 (inflation adjusted) and cost roughly 2.5x the median household income. Today, the median home price is $400,000 and costs 5x the median household income. In 1989, the median homeownership age was 34. Today, it is 56. Interconnected: Housing instability does not stay a housing problem. In a study of working renters in Milwaukee, Matthew Desmond and Carl Gershenson found that workers who were forced out of their homes were 11-22 percentage points more likely to be laid off than similar workers who were not. For children, the consequences show up in the classroom. Public schools identified more than 1.5 million homeless students in the 2023-24 school year, the most since national reporting began in 2004. Nearly half of those students were chronically absent, and their graduation rate was only 70%. In New York City, roughly one in seven public school students was homeless during the 2024-25 school year, and students living in shelters graduated at a rate of 62%, compared with 85% for their permanently housed classmates. 2. Healthcare Healthcare costs have been destroying family budgets for decades, but they have reached a new level of crisis. The average premium for employer-sponsored family coverage reached $26,993 in 2025, up 6% in a single year. Workers now pay $6,850 of that directly out of their paychecks. From 2014-2024, family premiums grew 52% while inflation rose 32%. After the enhanced ACA subsidies expired at the end of 2025, enrollees faced premium payments that were on average 114% higher to keep the same plan, and marketplace enrollment fell 13%, the first decline in years. KFF polling found that about 1 in 10 2025 marketplace enrollees said they had become uninsured as a result of these plan changes, the largest drop in insurance coverage in recorded history. When workers can’t get the care they need, their whole lives can fall apart. Economists tracked insured Americans in their 50s after a serious hospital stay and found that three years later they were 11 percentage points less likely to be employed. Their earnings had fallen by an average of 20%, or about $8,750 a year. Very little of that lost income was replaced by sick pay, disability insurance, or any other program, and these were people who had health insurance. Interconnected: Researchers found that when California expanded Medicaid early under the Affordable Care Act, the state observed 22 fewer evictions per year for every 1,000 new enrollees, likely because coverage kept medical bills from swallowing the rent, and forcing individuals into crime to pay their bills. Using IRS records, economists at the Treasury found that kids with more years of Medicaid eligibility were more likely to enroll in college. They also had lower mortality as young adults and paid more in taxes. By the time those children turned 28, the federal government had already recouped 58 cents of every dollar it spent on their coverage. 3. Education When the Nation’s Report Card results were published this summer, the data revealed a generation split by when the pandemic hit. If you were 9 years old when the pandemic started in 2020, you have since gained 4 points in both reading and math, with the biggest gains among lower performers. But if you were 13 years old, you saw no improvement at all. Zooming out though, math scores have been plummeting for 13 year olds for years. From 1978 to 2012, the average math scores for 13-year-olds improved by 21 points. The climbing scores were a bright spot in more than 50 years of data. But the new data reveals that the 21 point increase has completely disappeared. 13 year olds are now performing no better in math than they did in 1978. In eighth grade math, the gap between the highest and lowest performers was the widest in the test’s history. By senior year, 45% of twelfth graders scored below the basic level in math, and the distance between high and low performers was larger than on any previous assessment. At the college level, access still tracks family wealth more than academic talent. Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman found that children from the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college compared to middle-class children with the same SAT or ACT scores, driven by legacy preferences, athletic recruiting, and non-academic ratings that do not predict later success. Interconnected: Education has become one of the sharpest predictors of how long Americans live. Anne Case and Angus Deaton found in their seminal work that the gap in adult life expectancy between Americans with and without a bachelor’s degree grew from 2.6 years in 1992 to 6.3 years in 2019, and reached 8.5 years by 2021. Education debt also feeds directly into housing. When student loan delinquencies returned to credit reports in 2025, 2.2 million newly delinquent borrowers saw their credit scores drop by 100 poi… This is a public episode. 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