(Substack)—Homeownership remains the cornerstone of the American dream, yet skyrocketing prices and rents have left many families feeling squeezed out of reach. Politicians and pundits often point to a dire shortage of housing stock as the culprit, calling for massive new construction to ease the pressure. But what if the so-called crisis is little more than a fabricated narrative, designed to dismantle the very neighborhoods that define our communities?
Recent Census Bureau figures paint a different picture. As of the latest data, the United States boasts 131.3 million households but 146.5 million housing units—a surplus of more than 15 million empty or available homes. This gap suggests abundance, not scarcity.
Property attorney and former Trump administration official Paige Bronitsky drives this point home in her analysis, arguing that the housing “shortage” is a myth perpetuated by activists eager to reshape residential life along ideological lines. Instead of a lack of supply, she says, the real tension arises from a demand for premium, exclusive living spaces—much like the allure of a rare Hermes Birkin bag that commands sky-high prices not because of scarcity in leather, but because of its prestige.
Activists counter that the current vacancy rate of around 10% falls short of an ideal 12%, implying a need for another million units to hit that mark. Yet Bronitsky notes that vacancy rates have fluctuated between 8.3% and 14.5% since 1965, placing today’s figure squarely in the normal range. No crisis here, just a convenient benchmark to justify intervention.
They also lament a slowdown in construction, from an average of 1.5 million units per year between 1968 and 2000 down to 1.23 million since 2001, and speak of 3 to 5 million “missing” households bottled up by pent-up demand. Bronitsky dismantles this by tying it to shifting demographics: America’s population growth has halved from over 1% annually before 2000 to about 0.5% today, with projections dipping to 0.1% by 2055. Births will soon lag behind deaths, starting around 2038, and even the current administration’s push to deport a million people yearly doesn’t factor into rosy Census assumptions of steady immigration. In short, fewer people mean less need for new builds.
The push for more density isn’t about solving affordability—it’s about enforcing a social agenda. Bronitsky traces this back to a twisted interpretation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which originally aimed to open doors for equal opportunity by outlawing blatant discrimination like redlining and restrictive covenants. Families could live where they wished, provided they could afford it. Today, though, the law serves as a battering ram to erase disparities in who lives where, even if that means dragging down standards through forced integration.
Local zoning rules, which preserve a community’s character—think single-family homes in the suburbs or height limits in historic districts—stand in the way. Bronitsky warns that these regulations are under siege as a means to impose Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) quotas on everyday housing choices.
Take New York City as a stark example. The New York City Economic Development Corporation has zeroed in on upscale areas like the Upper East Side, SoHo, and the West Village, blasting their “restrictive land use regulations” for stifling density and affordability. But the telltale sign of the agenda comes in their blunt assessment: “Community Districts producing the least affordable housing are disproportionately white.”
This isn’t subtle—it’s a direct nod to racial demographics as the problem to fix. The goal? Flood these neighborhoods with high-density, low-income developments to “diversify” them, regardless of local wishes or the erosion of property values and safety.
This pattern echoes federal efforts under the Obama and Biden administrations. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rolled out the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, compelling towns that accept federal funds to scrap zoning barriers and track racial breakdowns in their populations. The aim was clear: introduce multifamily projects into affluent suburbs to shift voting patterns and flip conservative strongholds blue.
President Trump swiftly axed the rule within 14 days of taking office in 2017, thanks to advisors like John McEntee, and HUD Secretary Scott Turner followed suit later in his term. Yet Biden revived it, proving the persistence of this top-down social engineering.
Even some on the right have bought into the shortage rhetoric, advocating for zoning rollbacks without seeing the bigger trap. Bronitsky calls it a “stalking horse” for DEI mandates, where “optional” reforms become ironclad requirements. Massachusetts offers a cautionary tale: A 2021 state law ostensibly encouraged 177 towns along commuter rail lines to zone for multifamily housing near stations. In practice, it mandated changes, overriding local control to prioritize low-income units.
Liberal economist Paul Krugman has cheered this on, writing in a recent Substack post that “the obvious answer is to turn inwards — to build more housing by increasing population density, in particular by building multifamily housing.”
What Krugman frames as economic necessity is, in reality, a blueprint for upending suburban life—replacing quiet family blocks with towering apartments that strain infrastructure and alter the social fabric.
Recent reports from outlets like Newsweek echo Krugman’s call, blaming past policies for the affordability crunch while urging density as the fix. But critics, including economists like John Cochrane, question whether cramming more people into cities truly raises living standards or just dilutes them. The Heritage Foundation has long argued that such “smart growth” schemes fail to deliver on promises, often exacerbating costs without meaningful environmental gains.
At its core, this manufactured crisis threatens the autonomy of American neighborhoods. Democrats have already injected DEI into schools, corporations, and the military—now they’re coming for your block. The fight isn’t over bricks and mortar; it’s over who gets to decide how we live. Without vigilance, the suburbs that generations have built could vanish under the weight of ideological overreach.
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.