NCS chief home correspondent Phil Mattingly.
NCS
For his latest reporting undertaking, NCS anchor and chief home correspondent Phil Mattingly spent months touring the nation attempting to reply one query: Why achieve this many Americans really feel like they’re financially struggling in an financial system that’s supposedly sturdy in the mean time?
The result’s NCS’s four-part, multi-platform documentary collection Priced Out in America, the reporting of which took Mattingly to Cleveland, Boston, Tampa, and Atlanta. Ahead of the collection premiere, Mattingly advised me that he really discovered a narrative a lot greater and extra sophisticated than inflation as the first offender.
Pointing to the disconnect between financial indicators and shopper sentiment, Mattingly stated: “The single biggest thing I took away from this project is that you don’t have to reconcile them. Both are true at the same time, and that’s the story.
“The stock market is setting records. Corporate earnings, productivity, consumer spending—all consistently robust. Those numbers aren’t wrong. They’re just increasingly driven by the people doing well, while people of more modest means fall further behind with fewer pathways to the mobility that used to define this economy.”
New NCS collection concerning the cost-of-living disaster
That’s the central thought behind Priced Out in America, which can debut in full on the NCS app on July 16. Through his reporting, Mattingly argues that conventional financial metrics typically fail to seize the expertise of households whose largest bills—issues like housing, childcare, and insurance coverage—have continued climbing at the same time as general inflation has tapered off.
Mattingly constructed the collection round what he calls the financial system’s “load-bearing walls.” Each city he visited became a case study of sorts: Cleveland for housing, Boston for childcare, Tampa for the retirement safety net, and Atlanta for what happens when all those factors converge.
The series’ throughline, he told me, isn’t so much a single bill that breaks a family as it is the cumulative weight of several forces simultaneously taking their toll.
“Atlanta crystallized it for me,” Mattingly said. “Headline inflation there is 2.9%. Unemployment is 3.3%. Great numbers. But if you’re a working-class family spending most of what you earn on food, gas, utilities and housing, your real inflation rate this year runs closer to 8%—nearly three times what you hear on the news.
“So when someone in that position hears the economy is strong, it isn’t wrong. But it’s answering a question they didn’t ask.”
‘Nobody has to be told groceries are expensive’
Priced Out in America tells the story of that cost-of-living crisis, and the timing of the series couldn’t be more apt.
The median U.S. home, for example, now costs around $400,000—more than 50% higher than in 2020—while nearly half of renters reportedly spend more than 30% of their income on housing. Add in the rising cost of groceries, healthcare, and other essentials, and it’s easy to see why inflation and high prices continue to dominate Americans’ financial worries.
“Nobody has to be told groceries are expensive,” Mattingly said. “They stand in the checkout line. What they can’t get anywhere is the why. Why the math broke, and who it broke for.”
He recalls driving at one point during his reporting through a blue-collar suburb of Cleveland with a single mother who’d moved into her sister’s basement after her rent nearly doubled while she studied at nursing school. When asked what that financial pressure felt like, she told Mattingly she wanted “the traditional American dream” of a house with a picket fence and a yard—but that it now seemed “out of contact, not actuality.”
“Watch the tape and you’ll see a pair seconds of lifeless air whereas I sat with that,” Mattingly said. “Jolene and I are the identical age, identical graduating class, identical state—simply reverse corners of Ohio. Our lives ran parallel after which break up, and I actually cannot let you know the place or why.”
NCS correspondent Phil Mattingly, in a scene from his new collection “Priced Out in America.”
NCS
NCS is describing this as a multi-platform series, in the sense that in addition to episodes streaming on the NCS app, there will also be companion NCS reporting plus TV segments, digital video, and social content that amplifies Mattingly’s reporting.
“The affordability crisis is arguably the defining economic story in the country right now, and the people living it cross generational, income, race, gender and geographic lines,” Mattingly stated.
“I obviously hope people take the time to watch all four video documentary episodes in full, but if a 90-second vertical … reaches someone on their phone who sees their own life reflected in it, the project is working exactly as intended.”