(The Epoch Times)—Over 33 percent of baby boomers who are homeowners said they will never sell their homes, real estate brokerage Redfin said in a June 18 statement detailing the results of a survey.
“Another 30 percent say they’ll sell their home at some point, but not within the next decade,” said the report. As for older people, the survey reveals they are even less likely to sell than boomers. Nearly 45 percent of the Silent Generation do not plan to sell their residential properties.
The Redfin report, which surveyed roughly 4,000 U.S. residents, said younger homeowners are more likely to sell. Twenty-five percent of Gen Xers and 21 percent of millennials/Gen Zers said they would not sell.
The main reasons for not selling are that homeowners like their current homes, and they don’t wish to move. Besides, new homes have higher prices, and buyers would face elevated mortgage rates.
Redfin reports that home prices have gone up roughly 40 percent since pre-pandemic, and mortgage rates are near 7 percent.
The median price of homes sold in the United States was $416,900 in the first quarter of 2025, up from $329,000 in the same quarter of 2020, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Ten years ago, prices were even lower at $289,200.
Meanwhile, the weekly average interest on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has consistently remained above 6 percent since September 2022, according to data from Freddie Mac. For the most recent week ending June 18, rates were at 6.81 percent, more than double the 3.13 percent roughly five years back.
“Nearly one-third (31 percent) of baby boomers who own their home say they couldn’t afford a home like theirs in their neighborhood today,” said the report.
Regarding purchasing a new home, around one in four millennial and Gen Z renters say they cannot afford a home in an area where they want to live.
For the younger people, the other reasons, according to the survey, are being financially unprepared for surprise costs of owning a home, high mortgages, and inability to fund a down payment.
“While inventory is improving, supply is tight for young house hunters looking for family homes, especially in suburban areas where homes priced like starter homes—yet large enough for families—are scarce,” said Redfin Chief Economist Daryl Fairweather.
“With baby boomers opting to age in place rather than sell, it’s challenging for younger buyers to find affordable options that fit their lifestyle. But it’s worth noting that even though many older Americans say they’re not planning to sell their homes, many are likely to eventually part ways as it becomes harder to live independently and/or keep up with home maintenance.”
Tackling Affordability Crisis
Home developers have urged lawmakers to take action to tackle the housing affordability crisis.
Last week, more than 1,000 builders, remodelers, and associates from the construction sector visited Capitol Hill, asking lawmakers to support policies that will “help builders unleash the housing market,” the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) said in a June 11 statement.
“The best way to ease the nation’s housing affordability crisis and boost housing production is to break down the barriers that are impeding new home and apartment construction,” said NAHB Chairman Buddy Hughes.
Specifically, NAHB asked Congress to pass legislation preventing the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Housing and Urban Development from mandating a minimum energy standard for housing, arguing that these measures raise housing costs and price out buyers.
The group also urged lawmakers to consider tax legislation benefiting the construction sector, such as permanently extending the pro-housing and business policies from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, said the statement.
As for the pressure created by high mortgage rates on prospective buyers, things could improve this year.
In a June 12 commentary, Lisa Sturtevant, chief economist at real estate data company Bright MLS, said she expects mortgage rates to “decline more significantly at the end of the summer, leading up to the Fed’s September meeting.”
“Lower rates could bring more buyers out this fall. But it is becoming more of a possibility that weakening consumer confidence and labor market concerns may cast a long shadow into the fall housing market,” she wrote.
Scott Turner, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said in a June 19 X post, “The simple answer to addressing the housing affordability issue: Build more housing.”
Turner proposed building more Opportunity Zones that “allow our private sector to innovate and cut down costly red tape.”
Opportunity Zones, created under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, allow people to invest in distressed areas in America, according to an Oct. 8 post by the IRS. They are aimed at spurring “economic growth and job creation in low-income communities while providing tax benefits to investors.”
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.