(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Squatting has always been a problem, especially in certain parts of the nation, but now it is happening on an industrial scale all over America. Thanks to online listings, it is easier than ever to identify properties that are vacant, and many states have laws that make it exceedingly difficult to get squatters out once they have settled in. In some cases, squatters are able to live rent free in beautiful homes for months or even years. This is becoming an absolutely massive problems, especially in certain areas of the country. For example, it is being reported that squatters have taken over approximately 1,200 homes in the Atlanta area…
Squatters are ruining entire neighborhoods in Atlanta and police response to evict is so slow, some homeowners have resorted to paying nuisances to leave.
Brazen squatters even opened an illegal strip club on a property they had taken over — one of the 1,200 homes which has been squatted in the city, according to the National Rental Home Council (NRHC) trade group.
“I’d be terrified in Atlanta to lease out one of my properties,” Matt Urbanski, who manages a local home-cleaning company, told Bloomberg.
There is no way in the world that I would want to own a rental property in that city.
If you can believe it, there is even one company that has been running ads on social media offering to find a prime squatter home in Atlanta for you for a fee…
At first glance, it looks just like another real estate pro hustling to rent homes on social media.
But at 1 Time Payment Homes, the site makes it clear these are squatter homes and spells out just what that means in a pinned Insta story.
“The company’s owners will come out, so will the police. The police will tell you there’s nothing they can do about it — squatters rights,” our Channel 2 producer J.P. read off the Instagram account.
Recently, 1 Time Payment Homes has actually been running a “New Year’s special”.
$1,400 will get you the keys to a squatter home so that you can “stack money and turn ya life around”.
Whoever is behind 1 Time Payment Homes should be in prison.
But that is not how America works in 2024
Instead, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone gave those behind 1 Time Payment Homes some type of award. Of course it isn’t just in Atlanta where squatting has become such a widespread issue.
In the state of Washington, squatters have taken over an entire apartment complex and have turned it into a den of crime…
Squatters and crime are taking over a Fife apartment complex. Families and the people handling the property are both beyond frustrated.
The problems are at the Sherwood Park Apartments. Police say the situation also attracted a ton of criminal activity. Now officers regularly patrol the area because of all the problems.
Most of the units at the complex are covered in plywood.
“It’s bad,” said Angel, a resident at the apartments. “The cops are here 24/7. Every day, every night. I keep my kids inside. I don’t let them out.”
Thanks to the absurd laws in that state, it isn’t going to be easy to get those squatters out.
California also has ridiculous laws, and right now “a very sophisticated criminal ring of squatters” is making a ton of money from the Beverly Hills mansion that they have occupied…
A Beverly Hills mansion seized by the court from a fugitive surgeon behind California’s biggest insurance fraud scheme is now a wild party house taken over by squatters, who are profiting off of regular ragers that are driving neighbors nuts.
The Mediterranean estate at 1316 Beverly Grove, listed for $4.5 million has been occupied by “a very sophisticated criminal ring of squatters,” the home’s listing agent John A. Woodward IV tells Los Angeles magazine. The squatters, he believes, are earning upwards of $30,000 a month renting rooms and hosting huge house parties with $100 entry fees.
This sort of thing is happening all over the nation, but the worst problems are in blue states with laws that are very favorable for squatters.
Every single day, predatory squatters are scanning online listings in order to identify their next targets…
It’s also gotten easier for squatters to find homes to move into.
Online listings and virtual real estate agents can allow squatters to find vacant addresses and gain access by booking fake appointments.
Some people may not even know they are squatters as scam artists can set up fake listings for empty properties and fake lease agreements.
Once a squatter is in, it’s hard to get them out. It can take three months to get a court hearing for an eviction, and another three months to get a deputy or marshal to clear out the home.
What these squatters are doing is so wrong, but it is getting worse with each passing year.
Meanwhile, things just get harder and harder for people that are trying to do things the right way. In recent years, many have seen rental prices skyrocket to absolutely insane levels…
Single mom Caitlyn Colbert watched as rent for her two-bedroom apartment doubled, then tripled and then quadrupled over a decade in Denver — from $750 to $3,374 last year.
Every month, like millions of Americans, Colbert juggled her costs. Pay rent or swim team fees for one of her three kids. Rent or school supplies. Rent or groceries. Colbert, a social worker who helps people stay financially afloat, would often arrive home to notices giving her 30 days to pay rent and a late fee or face eviction.
“Every month you just gotta budget and then you still fall short,” she said, adding what became a monthly refrain: “Well, this month at least we have $13 left.”
The worse that housing affordability becomes, the more people are going to be tempted to engage in squatting.
Of course this squatting crisis is just one of the ways that our society is descending into complete and utter lawlessness.
We wanted a society where anything goes, and now that is precisely what we have got.
If you need to leave your home for a while, you may want to lock it up very tight, because there are plenty of squatters that would love to invade while you are gone.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.