62 Time May 9/May 16, 2022
Although Swope, a 42-year-old teacher,
and his wife Amanda Greene, a nurse,
make $125,000 a year, they couldn’t
handle that steep a rent increase —not
alongside the student loans and car pay-
ments and utility bills and all the other
costs that have kept growing for a fam-
ily of three. “The frustration —it was al-
ways a frog in the boiling water type of
thing. I’d always felt it, but on a basic
level. Something’s always brewing,”
says Swope from his modest apartment,
where Atlanta Braves bobbleheads com-
pete with books for shelf space. “We
looked at the rent increase, and it was
like, OK, this is ridiculous. I was like,
‘What the —???’ ”
For Jen Dewey-Osburn, 35, who lives
in a suburb of Phoenix, the rage arose
when she calculated how much she
owed on her student loans: although
she’d borrowed $22,624 and has paid off
$34,225, she still owes $43,304. (She’s in
a dispute with her loan servicer, Navient,
about how her repayments were cal-
culated.) She and her husband know
they’re more fortunate than most—both
have good jobs—but they feel so stuck
financially that they can’t envision tak-
ing on the cost of having children. “It’s
just moral and physical and emotional
exhaustion,” she says. “There’s no right
choices; it feels like they’re all wrong.”
The exasperation of Omar Abdalla,
26, peaked after his 12th offer on a
home fell through, and he realized how
much more financial stability his par-
ents, who were immigrants to the U.S.,
were able to achieve than he and his
wife can. They both have degrees from
good colleges and promising careers,
but even the $90,000 down payment
they saved up was not enough when
the seller wanted much more than the
bank was prepared to lend on the home
they wanted.
Abdalla’s parents, by contrast, own
two homes; his wife’s parents own four.
“Their house probably made more
money for them than working their job,”
he says. “I don’t have an asset that I can
sleep in that makes more money than
my daily labor. That’s the part that kind
of just breaks my mind.”
Middle-class U.S. families have been
treading water for decades—weighed
down by stalled income growth and
rising prices—but the runaway infla-
tion that has emerged from the pan-
demic is sending more than a ripple
of frustration through their ranks. The
pandemic seemed at first as if it might
offer a chance to catch up; they kept
their jobs as the service sector laid off
millions, their wages started climbing
at a faster rate as companies struggled
to find workers, and they began saving
more than they had for decades. About
one-third of middle-income Americans
felt that their financial situation had im-
proved a year into the pandemic, accord-
ing to Pew Research, as they quarantined
at home while benefiting from stimulus
checks, child tax credits, and the pause
of federal student- loan payments.
But 18 months later, they increas-
ingly suspect that any sense of finan-
cial security was an illusion. They may
have more money in the bank, but being
middle class in America isn’t only about
how much you make; it’s also about what
you can buy with that money. Some peo-
ple measure it by whether a family has a
second refrigerator in the basement or
a tree in the yard, but Richard Reeves,
director of the Future of the Middle
Class Initiative at the Brookings Insti-
tution, says that what really matters is
whether people feel that they can com-
fortably afford the “three H’s”—hous-
ing, health care, and higher education.
Over the past year alone, home prices
have leaped 20% and the cost of all
goods is up 8.5%. Families are paying
$3,500 more this year for the basic set
of goods and services that the Consumer
Price Index (CPI) follows than they did
last year. Average hourly earnings, bycontrast, are down 2.7% when adjusted
for inflation. That squeeze has left many
who identify as middle class reaching
to afford the three H’s, especially hous-
ing. In March, U.S. consumer sentiment
reached its lowest level since 2011, ac-
cording to the University of Michi-
gan’s Surveys of Consumers, and more
households said they expected their fi-
nances to worsen than at any time since
May 1980.
“The mantra has been: work hard,
pay your dues, you’ll be rewarded for
that. But the goalposts keep getting
moved back,” says Daniel Barela, 36, a
flight attendant in Albuquerque, N.M.,
who is exquisitely aware that his father
had a home and four kids by his age.
Barela and his partner made around
$69,000 between them last year, and he
feels as if he’s been jammed financially
for most of his adult life. He lost his job
during the Great Recession and, after
a major credit-card company raised
his interest rate to 29.99% in 2008, he
had to file for bankruptcy. “No matter
what kind of job I’ve held and no mat-
ter how much I work, it never seems to
be enough to meet the qualifications to
own a home,” he says.
Even if people Barela’s age, who make
up much of the middle class today, earn
more money than their parents did, even
if they have college degrees and their
choice of jobs, even if they have a place
to live, an iPhone, and a flat-screen TV,
many are now sensing that although they
followed all of American society’s rec-
ommended steps, they somehow ended
up financially fragile. “Our income sup-
posedly makes us upper middle class,
but it sure doesn’t feel like it,” says
Swope. “If you’re middle class, you can
afford to do fun things—and we can’t.”TIME talked to dozens of people
across the country, all of whose incomes
fall in the middle 60% of American in-
comes, which is what Brookings de-
fines as the middle class. For a family of
three, that means somewhere between
$42,500 to $166,900 today. Here’s what
we heard:
“The American Dream is an abso-
lute nightmare, and I just want out at
this point.”
“It’s really discouraging. I’m losing
hope. I don’t know what to do.”NATION
Jeff Swope felt the first spurt of anger
bubble up when he learned in February
that his landlord was raising the rent on the
empty two-bedroom apartment next door
by more than 30%, to $2,075 a month.