Communities all over the United States are being taken over by giant homeless encampments, but we are supposed to believe that this is perfectly normal. The Biden administration is trying very hard to convince all of us that the economy is in fine shape even though many of our most prominent corporations are currently conducting mass layoffs and even though Challenger, Gray & Christmas is telling us that the number of jobs cuts during the first three months of this year was up 396 percent compared to the same period last year.
Just like in 2008 and 2009, large numbers of people that have lost their jobs or their businesses are ending up living in the streets, and as a result homeless encampments are absolutely exploding in size from coast to coast.
In Marin County, California the average price of a home is 1.4 million dollars, and it is one of the most prosperous areas of the entire country.
But it is also home to vast hordes of homeless people. In fact, one of the biggest homeless encampments in Marin County is now more than two miles long…
Hundreds of locals in one of San Francisco’s wealthiest counties have been forced to pack up their lives into RVs and trailers after being pushed out of the housing market.
Shocking photos show the ever-growing line of trucks and other vehicles along 101 Highway – which now stretches over two miles in one of the largest encampments in the country.
The Federal Reserve knew that pumping vast amounts of money into the system would make the wealthy even wealthier, but they also hoped that some of that wealth would eventually trickle down to the poor.
Sadly, that didn’t really happen.
Instead, the gap between the wealthy and the poor has gotten larger than it has ever been before, and now we are witnessing scenes like this all over the nation…
I was absolutely floored when I first viewed that footage. Those that live there are trying to make the best of it. In fact, one woman that recently “moved in” is comparing it to “heaven”…
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“My life here … it’s OK to me. It’s really relaxing. There’s no harassment,” Shelly G. told the Post.
Shelly, 53, moved to Binford Road from Petaluma at the beginning of April to join her friend Terry.
Shelly was seated under a covered area behind a green vehicle and held her small dog, Bailey, as she talked to the Post.
“This right here, this is heaven,” she went on.
No, you are not living in “heaven”. You are 53-years-old and you are living in a vehicle on the side of the road.
But I give her credit for trying to put a positive spin on her very distressing circumstances.
Of course she is far from alone. More than half a million Americans are currently homeless, and that number is inevitably going to grow much larger.
Many would argue that the problem is even worse in southern California. The homeless encampment along San Vicente Boulevard in Beverly Grove just continues to expand, and this has pushed one physician to the breaking point…
Dr. Kenneth Wright, a physician and surgeon, has been working out of an office in the neighborhood for 22 years.
“For the last year and a half to two years, there’s been encampments on both sides of our office building. Patients are afraid to come in. Many of them have psychiatric problems, drug problems, and they’re screaming profanities. They [unhoused people] defecate in our planters, defecate in the parking lot and it’s gotten to the point now that I had to leave. My office staff is afraid. They’re afraid to come to the office. They come in pairs,” said Wright.
I feel very badly for him. But at least he has the option of moving his office.
Other types of businesses are not so easy to relocate. Unfortunately, it has now become nearly impossible to escape this crisis in some cities.
At this point, the entire city of Portland is essentially one enormous homeless encampment, and countless businesses have fled for greener pastures as a result.
Yes, some of the people living in these homeless encampments are drug addicts and criminals, but there are also a lot of hard working individuals that have just had some tough luck.
These days, most of the population is barely scraping by from month to month, and inflation has pushed housing costs to absurdly high levels…
Americans are facing one of the toughest markets in years – with up to 20 prospective renters per single apartment in some cities.
The Northeast is ground zero in the battle for a new apartment, as inflation, interest rate hikes and cost of living pressures shatter the home ownership dreams of many Millennials and Gen Zers.
Almost half of the 20 most competitive markets for renting in 2023 are in the Northeast, with North Jersey topping the list, according to Rent Café, which analyzed 134 markets across the U.S.
I can hardly believe what landlords are asking these days.
In New York City, the average rent on a one-bedroom apartment has now reached five thousand dollars a month…
That high demand could partly be a result of New York renters getting sticker shock from exorbitant renewal rates for shoe boxes in the city, where one-bedrooms are now going for an average of $5,000 per month.
Can you imagine paying $5,000 a month for an apartment with just one bedroom?
That is insanity.
But thanks to the Federal Reserve, this is our country now.
And as economic conditions deteriorate, the number of Americans that are getting booted out of their rentals has been soaring…
All told, landlords filed nearly 970,000 eviction cases across the sites that we track in the ETS, an increase of 78.6% compared to 2021.
Those that are running things are not going to be able to fix this. In the months ahead, many more Americans will lose their jobs, and many more Americans will get evicted from their homes.
That means that a lot more people will be joining the ranks of the homeless, and homeless encampments will continue to rapidly grow all over the country.
Please do not look down on those that end up in the homeless encampments, because with a few bad breaks you could be one of them too.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
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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.