(DCNF)—A new report appears to the show the true extent of the U.S. housing crisis.
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) spending appears to have no effect on lowing housing prices, according to a recent report by government spending watchdog OpenTheBooks.com, which analyzed data released by the U.S. Census Bureau and Federal Housing Finance Agency from 2015 to 2024. Additionally, the data suggests it that homeownership has become harder to attain in nearly every state regardless of partisan lean.
“Americans are rightly focused on affordability issues on the heels of years of historic inflation and new pressure on energy prices. Those macroeconomic factors have put homebuying out of reach for many Americans,” a spokesperson for OpenTheBooks.com told the DCNF.
The report defines the disparity between the change in house prices and the change in household income as the “affordability gap.”
The average affordability gap across all 50 states was 42.67%, whereas the 2024 Presidential Election’s seven battleground states averaged 54.77% — with Pennsylvania being the outlier at 34.79%.
However, housing affordability is not affected by whether one lives in a “red” or “blue” state, the data suggests.
The ten states with the widest gap were: Idaho (83.33%), Florida (77.19%), Utah (69.06%), Tennessee (66.15%), Arizona (65.47%), New Hampshire (65.36%), Nevada (65.25%), Maine (62.26%), Rhode Island (61.73%), and Washington (60.51%).
Meanwhile, the ten with the narrowest were: Louisiana (6.62%), West Virginia (9.93%), North Dakota (13.15%), Mississippi (16.11%), Alaska (18.75%), Illinois (20.51%), Maryland (23.48%), Iowa (25.89%), California (27.22%), Hawaii (29.16%), and Delaware (29.46%).
The HUD did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
HUD spending did not appear to affect it affordability either, per the report.
“Looking at the figures, prices have galloped ahead of incomes in every state in the union over the course of a decade,” the spokesperson said. “Nearly a half a trillion dollars was spent trying to make housing more affordable and accessible, but an analysis demonstrates it had no meaningful relationship with the state-by-state affordability gap families are now facing.”
The states that saw a high level of HUD spending on a per capita basis had figures up to $3,940, like Massachusetts. Many states were over $1,000 or over $2,000 per capita.
“What seems clear is this kind of massive top-down spending not only exacerbates inflationary pressures, it’s not demonstrably efficient or effective. It doesn’t seem to helping Americans close that gap between growing prices and incomes,” he said.
He told the DCNF that “a variety of other factors need to be considered” like local spending, regulation, and “more sensible federal budgeting.”
“Shoveling money at the problem from far-away Washington does not hold a lot of hope … The further from the construction site, the less effective these decisions and investments are likely to be,” he continued.
However, one thing that may have affected housing affordability is the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In a handful of states with, it’s also true that they experience an influx of folks who were leaving big cities during the Covid crisis,” the spokesperson said. “Idaho is a good example where home prices skyrocketed and people leaving states like California likely impacted that. But Idaho was also number one in the nation for income growth over that decade, which suggests that where people are moving, growth and opportunity are likely to follow in the future.”
He also told the DCNF that an even more “staggering” finding is the time it’d take a household with a median income to save up for a down payment on an average home in their state.
“If we presume a 10% pre-tax savings rate, which is by no means easy for every American, it would take more than 9 years to save for a 20% down payment in Alaska. That’s on the short end,” the spokesperson said. “In Maine, you’d be looking at a quarter of a century. After reviewing the numbers, it gets a lot easier to see why younger generations may have concluded the dream is out of reach and even given the American Dream a Gen Z makeover.”
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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.
