There was a time when donation dumpsters opened wide enough for a child to slip through. Old fabric and metal have a particular stench— the mix of rust, dust, and the remnants of body odor. The scrape of metal. The cold air. The darkness inside. You wait until the sun sets to save face. You s lide through a slot meant for large garbage bags, hoping for a soft landing of clothes rather than the hard edge of an old electronic or half-broken plastic toy. Melvin Medina We never took more than we needed. That was my mother’s rule. Moderation, even in survival – a gray space where rules, dignity, and necessity blur together. I remember the bins, but I also remember my mother distributing what we found to family and neighbors in our red brick apartment building. Even in scarcity, there was dignity. There was  community. Narratives matter. They reset our values. They shape what a society believes is fair. They determine which policies become plausible. And when ruthlessly designed, people are harmed. Today, the popular political narrative  is “affordability,” but the story is familiar. My family lived through the last time a word like this reshaped what people could count on. Back then, Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” rhetoric gave way to a softer language of “personal responsibility” under Bill Clinton. The federal government replaced the longstanding Aid to Families with Dependent Children with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, imposing strict limits on how long someone could have help, and harsh work requirements. Connecticut was among the harshest. Work requirements expanded. Personal responsibility became the governing language of the era. Today, we are watching the federal government once again slash public benefits. Tens of thousands of people in Connecticut have lost access to SNAP unless they meet new and increasingly stringent work requirements. And yet – last month, President Trump declared: “I’ve won affordability … We brought back the American dream.” The language shifts, but the logic hasn’t. Politicians are still redirecting blame toward hard-working people rather than the system itself. And people are working hard, in every sense — paid and unpaid, formal and informal — and it still isn’t leading to stability. Stability is the true measure of whether people are doing okay. Anything short of that is just branding. Connecticut’s response to people hurt by these changes has largely followed the same logic as the past— relying on indirect and fragmented support rather than direct assistance. Despite nearly $300 million available in a dedicated federal response fund, it remains unclear whether the state will help families cut off from food assistance. We should be outraged. But we should also be clear-eyed about how we got here. The premise of the personal responsibility era was simple: work would lead to stability. If families were struggling, the problem was their choices, not the system itself. For decades, that story held for politicians, because the struggle it described could be confined to the margins – to working families like mine, who were navigating the narrow space between dignity and survival. Today, that story is crumbling as more people are pulled into instability. Across Connecticut, people who are working — often consistently and in multiple jobs — are struggling to keep up with the cost of living. Since 2018, the cost of essentials has risen sharply. Food prices have increased by more than 30 percent, while household energy costs have risen even faster. Wages haven’t grown enough to offset these increases or restore stability. Nowhere is that pressure more visible than in housing, where median rent has increased by roughly 30 percent in just a few years to about $1,500 a month. Half of all renters are cost-burdened — paying more than 30 percent of their income just to keep a roof over their heads. And one in four renters is severely cost-burdened, with housing consuming more than half of what they earn. Work is no longer building stability. Instead, most renters are being pushed to the edge of survival. This is a structural problem. The data is clear:  households with the least income are facing the fastest increases in their largest and least flexible expense. Affordability cannot rest on a single strategy that works slowly and reaches people unevenly. It must use policy to reach those currently left out of the very systems meant to provide stability. This is what it means to treat affordability as a matter of justice. A good affordability framework lowers costs and expands access to stability. Doing one without the other is insufficient. Otherwise, the strain does not stay at the margins. It expands, pulling more of the middle into the same instability. We are already seeing that shift. We are entering a new political era. The language has shifted. The urgency is real. But language alone is not enough. If this is to be an era of affordability, we should be clear about what that means. Affordability cannot be reduced to a slogan. It cannot be measured solely by whether costs tick down at the margins. Connecticut should have an affordability agenda rooted in justice and fairness. Our state must confront the structures that have made stability harder to reach, not simply ease the symptoms those structures produce. And it must be judged by a simple standard: does it create stability? If we are serious about affordability, our state’s policies must begin to reflect that standard. For example, a renter’s tax credit is a necessary step toward correcting that imbalance. Two proposals now before the legislature — one advanced by House leadership and another a Senate priority bill — reflect a growing recognition that renters must be part of any serious affordability agenda. That momentum matters. Renters in Connecticut are disproportionately lower income and far more likely to be paying a significant share of their income just to remain housed. Despite that reality, our tax system does little to account for their housing costs, including rising property taxes passed through in rent. Stability should not depend on whether you own or rent. Yet our policies treat hard-working renters and homeowners  differently. While taxes are tough on all working and middle class people,homeowners can get tax relief for their housing costs, which allows them to build stability over time. Renters are largely left out. That is not a neutral system. It is a choice by our government. A renter’s tax credit should be refundable and targeted to working class households paying disproportionate shares of their income on rent — those for whom stability remains persistently out of reach. Real affordability means being honest about why stability has been out of reach for so many working people: because of unfair policies that put rising costs on the backs of the people least able to afford them, and that extend relief to some at expense of the many. It requires changing the structures that create instability – like our tax code – not scapegoating the people they hurt. The true measure of affordability is whether people’s work allows them to build stability over time, and whether it offers a path beyond constant tradeoffs between necessity and dignity. Working class people are asking for something simple: a system where their work leads to stability. Stability, ultimately, is the truest measure of belonging. Melvin Medina is Vice President of Advocacy and External Affairs at the Connecticut Project Action Fund.   ...read more read less