(CBN)—Housing costs in America have skyrocketed, leaving many families struggling to keep up. The shortage of affordable housing has created a crisis, forcing people to choose between basic needs and a place to live.
While many high-end houses are being built at a steady pace, millions of Americans are struggling. Many low-income families spend more than half of their paycheck on rent, leaving them barely able to afford even the most basic housing.
“This rent is ridiculous, I don’t know what’s going on in the world,” said one renter in Norfolk, Virginia.
Experts blame a number of reasons behind this and expect it to get worse.
“We are in a housing crisis,” said Will Fish with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “There are hundreds of thousands of people in this country who have no home at all.”
He went on to say a record 653,000 Americans experience homelessness any given night – a stark reminder of people living on the margins.
“There are many more millions who are paying very high shares to their income for rent, and are often, you know, just one step back away from being evicted and losing their home,” Fish said.
For others like Cherise Ryan, a student juggling school and a part-time job, the burden of rising rent is a bit overwhelming.
“It’s affecting me because I’m in school right now and I’m not working,” said Ryan. “So, you know, (I’m) trying to be in school and doing a little Ubering to pay the bills.”
Vanessa Brown Calder from the CATO Institute highlights how the transformation of many cities into luxury hubs – where the average home now costs $1 million or more – is driving rent prices to outpace income growth. For instance, studies indicate that since 2000, rents have surged by over 50%, while average incomes have only increased by about a third of that rate.
She also notes construction costs and zoning restrictions complicate the affordable housing puzzle.
“What’s happening here is we are just not able to build enough housing, even with higher construction levels, we are not able to build enough housing to make up for the big hole that we are in,” Calder said.
That hole she references is a shortage of nearly 20 million homes, widening the gap between available homes and potential buyers.
“I do think that the private market is the solution to housing affordability issues,” said Calder. “The private market can only be unleashed to solve those problems if the government gets out of the way and removes some of this unnecessary red tape and restrictive regulation. We need policymakers leading the charge to reform government regulations.”
Certain states are taking the lead, making significant changes in reforming housing policies. Legislators in both red and blue states have moved to modernize zoning laws, streamline the residential planning process, and update standards for home building and design.
Progress is being made in Virginia Beach, with a move toward ‘workforce housing’ designed to help blue-collar families, including police officers and firefighters, afford a place to live in this competitive market. Despite criticism, this approach exceeds city zoning regulations and removes land once zoned for farming.
There are also private efforts like the Kingdom Builder Group in Phoenix, stepping up in faith to help.
“We want people to know that we’re different,” said Patrick Smythe, President of Kingdom Builder Group. “We’re trying to build the kingdom through providing housing – and really just showing people the love of Christ in all that we do; how we treat our customers, how we treat our subcontractor partners.”
Partnering with Boxabl, a group designing prefabricated homes, the group focuses on affordable construction for low-income families and veterans. They also collaborate with churches and veteran organizations to create sustainable projects that support the city’s spiritual and social needs.
“The current zoning ordinances in all municipalities across the country are kind of antiquated,” Smythe said. “You know, I could build 20 units in six months, if the government would do the zoning and get out of the way.”
As housing costs likely continue to rise, so will the need for affordable, working-class housing. The hope is reforms will expand beyond the state-level and private market to bring Americans-in-need closer to the dream of stable, affordable homes.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
